Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background.

Received a call to collect on a 17 year old, charged off debt. What do I do?
There are statutes of limitations on how long they can wait before coming after you.  14 years certainly exceeds it, which I believe means you are not legally required to pay. statutes of limitations by state The most likely scenario is that this is a scam.  Second most likely is that this is a collections agency trying to trick you into paying even though they don't have legal authority to force you.  In that case if you do pay them anything, then the statute of limitations restarts and they can legally start giving you trouble, so definitely don't do that. If they keep harassing you, you can probably take legal action against them.  That's the worst case scenario, though.  I'd just ignore them. At this point, if they are legally entitled to any money, which I highly doubt, they will need to take you to court.  They are not going to do that over $1000. Blocking their number might be a reasonable idea. I would doubt whether they can even do anything to your credit rating over this issue.  If you are worried about your credit, you can check your oustanding debts and negative incidents at www.annualcreditreport.com and see if you see anything.  I would be surprised. Edit: You might read up about time-barred debts (assuming it's not a scam.  I still think it is). FTC page on time-barred debt