
Quoting
aardvarc
You most certainly can open accounts by phone and never sign anything. That's how I've done the majority of my accounts, and have never had an issue.
How to they tell it's yours, or make their case to the court? Pretty easy as long as the information on the account matches yours, especially if the statements were being sent to an address that can be shown as your home or work address or to any email address associated with you, if any payments were ever made on the account from some account of yours (checking, savings, etc.). You are certainly correct that it is very easy to open accounts in other people's names - it can really be done with minimal information - but if they have evidence that ties you to the use of the account, particularly where payments to the account are concerned, then you'll have little in the way of defense trying to get the court to believe that it's not your account (if you have access to pay on the account, then you have access to view statements regarding the account). Unless of course you also plan to claim that someone opened a checking account in your name, deposited money into that account, and paid the bill to nurse the account along, and you were oblivious to it all. If that's the case, your best defense will be a stack of police reports, one for each account tied into the mess. But don't expect a court to believe that scenario if you didn't file such reports until after the debt went to collection, got sold again, and finally went to court. A reasonable reaction, if the account in question wasn't yours, would have been to file a police report when you got the first whiff that there was some bogus account with your name on it floating around out in the world.