Topic: Original creditor trying to connect with me on LinkedIn

[Milkbone]

Hello,
I received a connection request on LinkedIn that I found to be suspicious, and corresponded with a collector's call. The profile claimed they worked in the "Accounting Department" of a company that turned out to be a thinly veiled DBA for the collector.

After researching the issue, I found a Florida case saying that debt collectors can't contact people on Facebook. Nothing else. The laws are so old, they don't cover issues like this.
Any comments?

Thank you,
MB

[CleaningUp]

If you are in Florida you might have a case.

You can use the argument in court, but then it's going to be up to the judge.

[debtfree2b]

One angle on this would be how they would have communicated with you through LinkedIn or if they would have tried to contact your friends to see if they knew where you were.  Depending on how you contact someone through LinkedIn, the message wouldn't be private, and would be in the hands of a 3rd party (linkedin) so there would be a possible privacy issue there.

I've asked companies to just "email" me the info they supposedly had and have been told they can't email it or even send collection type notices through email due to privacy issues and they can't guarantee who would open it.

An interesting twist could be seeing the employee manual for such company and/or state laws on communication because the CA would need to be able to keep records of all communications and LinkedIn, similar to Facebook, would prove to be an issue as they'd need username and password to access the Linkedin account (note all the controversy on that right now for facebook passwords during hiring and employee issues).

Many many companies also have policies against using social media on the clock, so the employee, while it may be "in the interest of the company" to use their personal account to hunt you down, is technically violating policies to obtain the information.

Good luck!