OT: I am being sued for child support

[seashoreCM]

I'm tempted to say that you may make your first "answer" by writing an ordinary letter to the attorney and send a copy to the court. By ordinary, I mean that you would not have to put it on any particular form or follow any particular textual layout (such as in the book, Massachusetts Rules of Civil Procedure).

In the letter you would dispute the claim. You could say such things as "this (what they citied) is not my social security number; this (what they cited) is not the color of my hair; this is not my age." Since DH found another more likely name, you may mention that name too.

This next part gets a bit sticky. As part of the idea of not submitting your personal information, I would say omit your autograph after the "Sincererly yours" in the letter. If you know for a fact they already have this (pictorial; graphic) information, such as their having sent you a copy of some previous document you did sign, then you should sign all subsequent documents as needed. This is one area where others have suggested having an attorney write the first letter to make it look better.

All this gives the attorney a chance to review the whole case and perhaps drop it in favor of finding the correct party to go after. No rush.

As far as I know, the defendant does not have to pay a fee when answering a summons or even when filing his own motions.

 

[manditrianne]

My brother had this happen. Hit by a loan company for a car he never bought.

Like the others said DO NOT GIVE THEM YOUR INFO. Let them prove it. My brother tried working directly with the loan company, and they just "corrected" their database replacing the guilty party with HIS full name and SS#. A huge mess and took quite awhile to clear up.

Somewhat similarly, my DH is being sought in collection of an account that was never his, but when we checked, there wasn't any negative reports on our credit report. I talked to the legal department at my office and, as long as our credit is not touched, we plan to notify them in writing that they have sought the wrong person. Unless this changes, we are not pursuing it any more in case it's a phishing scam. I completely agree with NEVER giving your personal information out unless it's to an officer of the court at a courthouse in this case.