Adam Wisniewski manages a department store near Buffalo, N.Y., and earns enough to support himself and his young son without falling behind on his bills. But one day in June, he learned he had been marked as a deadbeat. He swiped his bankcard to pay a cell-phone bill, and the card was rejected, even though he'd just deposited $800. The bank said his account was frozen and gave him the name of the law firm responsible for his problem.

Wisniewski expected to clear up the problem quickly with a call. But the law firm didn't budge, he says. He was told he had to pay $500 to unfreeze the bank account -- a portion of the $3,392 the law firm claimed he owed. And his bank charged him $100 for putting a freeze on the account. "I was supposed to go on vacation," Wisniewski says. "Instead I sat around the house."

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The problem ran deeper than he imagined. Without his knowing it, Wisniewski had been summoned to appear in court by a collection agency and been found responsible for an unpaid Citibank Visa card balance back in 2001. The five-year-old judgment lay like an unexploded land mine until a law firm that specializes in collections came after the money.

Wisniewski denies incurring the debt and says the case against him was weak. Whoever received the hand-delivered notice of the lawsuit in 2000 had blond hair; his is dark brown.

And this: Citibank says it has no record of Wisniewski ever having held one of its Visa cards.

Troubling trend

More and more people like Wisniewski are finding themselves hit with unjustified or even illegal collection actions, according to state regulators. Minnesota Solicitor General Lori Swanson sums up the phenomenon seen across the country: "Companies cross the line by trying to coerce consumers into paying unsubstantiated debts and amounts that weren't even owed in the first place." Complaints to the Federal Trade Commission about collectors have quadrupled since 2001, to 66,627 last year. In fact, the number-one complaint the agency receives about them is that people are getting squeezed for money they don't owe.

Some terrified victims pay even though the debts aren't legitimate, says San Diego Assistant District Attorney Tricia Pummill. Prosecutors in San Diego jailed collector Edward M. Davis for extortion after he admitted that he had posed as a lawyer and threatened to have people arrested unless they paid him for alleged debts. Real prosecutors go after debtors only when there's fraud, Pummill says, and they don't call first. "We like to surprise people."

While Davis posed as an attorney, real lawyers have been caught using similar tactics. John Daniel Lenahan, whose Buffalo-area offices employed scores of collection workers, gave up his law license in March and admitted to a string of criminal charges, including abusive collections and charging illegal fees.

Tales of hardball collectors who demand a pound of flesh are multiplying, but they're hardly new. A longtime practice is for agencies known as third-party collectors to try to collect on accounts that the original creditor has given up on. It's common for them to work on a contingency basis, taking a cut of up to half of what they're able to collect. More recently, collectors have been buying the debt outright, and often pay 10 cents on the dollar. The combination of stubborn debtors and lucrative rewards motivates collectors to squeeze hard for the money. Congress acknowledged this back in 1977, when it passed the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, which outlaws false threats and harassment. Other rules prohibit collectors from calling before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. They can contact neighbors or others to get your address or phone number. But they're not allowed to discuss your debt with them.

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