Is it illegal to lie to a CA about address, salary, etc? How about lying to the OC when they try to collect from you about address, salary, etc? Is it better to just ignore them and not say anything?
Why are you even answering? Do you always tell strangers your personal financial information when they call you on the phone? If your phone discussion is dealing with something other than determining the validity of a debt, or their address to send written communications to, what purpose is it accomplishing? In the world we live in, if you disclose financial information to the wrong party, you open yourself up to theft, fraud, id theft, and more. See the discussion here, under "Threat #4": http://www.pennlawyer.com/fdcpa.htm The following is my understanding. I am NOT an attorney. In the absense of a judgement, and a court order to disclose your financial condition, you have no obligation to disclose it to someone calling you on the phone, or sending you a legal looking document. In fact, the only reason they have to demand it of you is to abuse and intimidate you, threatening to embarass you at work and take money from your bank account or paycheck, before they even have the legal right to do so. They have no legitimate reason to demand such information if they have no such legal right. In general, lying by itself is not illegal. People do it all the time, CAs especially. They are probably lying the moment they tell you their names, since they usually use aliases. They may also be lying the moment they tell you they know a debt is yours, since they often have no idea whether the party they are calling is the right one. And they may tell you other lies they think will get you to pay, usually verbally and not in writing since they think they can get away with it. When CAs use deception to collect a debt, it may violate FDCPA, which contains specific legal prohibitions against use of deception to collect debts, and misrepresentation of legal documents as not legal documents (allowing them to get default judgements), or non-legal documents as legal ones (allowing them to make illegal threats). When you lie when you have some specific legal obligation to tell the truth, such as you are under oath, are disclosing something under penalty of perjury, in response to a court order, to a law enforcement official or government regulatory investigator, or if you have a fiduciary responsibility to another party, you can get yourself in a lot of trouble. Martha Stewart did not go to federal prison for insider stock trading; she went to prison for lying to a federal investigator looking into stock trading. It may be fraud to lie in applying for a loan, representing that you have a certain level of income, or are employed by some employer, when that is not true, in order to get them to loan you money. It would similarly be fraud to lie on your resume and claim to have degrees you don't have, from schools you never attended, or licenses you don't have (That M.D. license you got by mail order??), in order to get a job. There are specific laws against lying, called "pretexting", to obtain information that you are not entitled to from financial institutions. Even obtaining information to which you are not entitled from non-financial institutions by "pretexting" may ensnarl you in id theft charges, as some unhappy ex-HP employees and directors can tell you. And of course, it can be tax fraud to knowingly put false information on your tax returns.
