David Dayen has a good piece at TNR about the complete clusterfuck that is debt collection in the US: "Someone Else's Debt Could Ruin Your Credit Rating."
This happened to me many years ago. Someone with a name sort of like mine (good enough!) racked up a bunch of debt in Indianapolis, and the debt collectors came after me. It ended up being filed on my credit report, and I wrote to the credit agencies to get it removed (which is all you can do, since they don't have public contact info beyond mailing addresses). My entreaties were ignored, so I had shitty credit for years, through absolutely no fault of my own.
It's horrifying how costly these careless and common misidentifications can be. And how little control we have over trying to rectify it.
Often, getting this sorted out depends entirely on the good will of debt collectors and credit agencies who profit explicitly from not having any good will in the first place.
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