Received letter from ARS National Services Inc. regarding a PayPal credit charge from 2014

[gstambaugh]

My daughter received a letter from a collection agency that bought a PayPal credit account.  She has NEVER had a PayPal credit account and the charges for from Beauty God and Desiree AP back in September, 2014.  Google those names there and you find nothing.  The total amount is $271.01.  What can she do to dispute this?  She asked for the account information that the person charged and some of the information like phone numbers were correct but her old numbers and ARS doesn't have the original purchase information.  This sounds like a scam or fraud that involves a person using a fake or closed gmail account <removed>  She has never had that email account and ARS told her to log into her PayPal account with that gmail account.  She cannot log into the account because she doesn't know the password because it is not her account.  How can she fix this? 

[DPCreations]

Probably not a scam.

It's not something PayPal could fix as the debt has been passed on to the collection service.

it's important to understand how collection services work.  They could start with a person's name and address.  A problem happens when the real person moves and letters sent to the real debt owner get returned.  Now the collection agency tries to find the right person by general searches.

You could do your own resarch.  Is there anyone else in your city with the same name.  Debt collectors do sometimes send to the wrong person (we have personal experience with getting someone else's debt letter).

So, the debt may not be yours. You would need to contact the debt collector and let them know that you are not the right person.  You could also ignore, as long as you are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN IT IS NOT YOUR DEBT (your daughter's).

Be extremely cautious about attemptig to log into a PayPal email which is not yours (or you daughter's).