Found out my wife’s getting sued from another law firm offering to defend my wife…

Location: Los Angeles.

We got a letter from a law firm today post dated 6/29 that looked suspicious so we opened it only to find out that it’s a law firm letting my wife know she is getting sued by synchrony bank for over 6 grand related to a Sam’s club Mastercard which we never opened. They were offering to defend us. The plaintiff that filed on the banks behalf is a law firm specializing in debt collection in San Diego. I looked up the case number and lo and behold a case was filed on 6/24 at the Norwalk courthouse with my wife’s name on there.

Here’s the thing, I was able to get all the court documents online and there was no proof of service that the summons was received. We haven’t received anything at all in the mail…we had just moved to our current place back in march and had all our mail forwarded from our old place.

We checked all our credit accounts, credit karma, Experian…and nothing. Clean. We’ve got great credit btw…I’m at 750+ and my wife is at 800+. We called synchrony banks fraud department and gave them my wife social and they pulled up every account we knew of and no Sam’s club Mastercard whatsoever.

So legally they have my wife’s name and address on court documents but the debt is for sure fraudulent. We’re past the 30 days from when the case was filed on 6/24. Haven’t received summons nor has a proof of service been filed. We are unsure how to go about this besides calling our credit bureaus and putting a fraud alert and trying to contact the plaintiffs law office in the morning. From what I read online on their 2 out of 5 star review they rarely pick up. I’m still doing my research, so far I’m looking into requesting a validation of debt letter. I really don’t want to hire an attorney just to tell another attorney to kick rocks when we did nothing in the first place.

Any advice or experience with this sort of situation guys?