I live in a two story townhouse divided into two "apartments." My address and that of my downstairs neighbor at the same, save for "Apartment A" and "Apartment B". My new telephone number was just listed correctly to me in the latest phone book a month ago, but without the apartment designation. But now in the last week or so I've been getting telemarketer calls asking for my downstairs neighbor by name, and none for me.

The strange things are:

• My neighbor and I don't share a telephone number, and never have.
• My neighbor has lived there through three different upstairs renters, including me. They all had different phone numbers on different accounts.
• A couple of the operators so far have confirmed that they dialed my number, not his, but have his name and address on the computer screen. Obviously they say they know nothing about the data collection.
• Not only are they not similar numbers, they're actually in two different area codes!
• They key point, that I discovered this week, is that my neighbor has an unlisted number, so the only valid number that comes up for my house address is mine.

I'm assuming that they're matching up his address from mass-mailing lists and then trying to find the phone number through reverse lookup, or vice versa. A number of web searches to find out if this happens to anyone else turned up nothing.

I'm worried that this could possibly mux up some information somewhere and reflect badly on me in the future.

Has this ever happened to anyone else? What did you do about it?

JoAnne Schmitz replied on February 19, 2002 to say:

The reason they're doing this is because they are trying to track the guy down for unpaid bills, though they won't say so. They also may suspect that your number is his and you've just gotten a new number in a new name to avoid creditors' calls. They have his number, he just isn't answering the phone when they call.

This is VERY common and has been going on since at least 1987 (when I was the nonpayor and a neighbor came to me saying there was a very important phone call I had to reply to at such-and-such a number).

It won't reflect on you. When it happened to me they had to buy special expensive "criss-cross" directories to do it so it wasn't so common. Now reverse lookup is easy so they use it a lot.

Find out exactly who is calling and tell them (a) you have nothing to do with your neighbors' business and (b) to remove your name from their information sheet and never to call you again. If they persist tell them you will sue.

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