Callers Get No Credit for Dialing Her Number : Telephone: Sarah Wexler has the same number as a bank credit card center in another area code. She says that she shouldn’t be the one to pay for a new number.

Sarah Wexler is not with the Bank of America. She doesn’t want to know your name and credit card number. And please don’t tell her when you plan to be out of town.

The 24-year-old student at Santa Monica City College has the misfortune of having the same phone number--although in a different area code--as that of a Bank of America credit card center. For the last year, she has received an average of 12 calls every day from bank customers.

Despite her attempts to convince callers that she doesn’t care about their credit card woes, the customers refuse to believe that she isn’t a bank employee.

“The people are calling and leaving lots of confidential information,” Wexler said. “I’ve had people leave their credit card numbers and their addresses. Sometimes they tell me they’re going on vacation. If I were a dishonest person, I could easily go and rob somebody’s home.”

Wexler, who has long coveted a credit card of her own but who so far has been unable to get one, began receiving calls from credit card customers almost as soon as she changed her phone number last October.

“At first, it was very confusing because people would just call and give me their credit card numbers,” Wexler said. “It took about a week for me to figure out what was going on and another week and a half to figure out where it was coming from.”

The callers, it turned out, were responding to messages left by credit card operators with Bank of America’s main credit card center in Pasadena. The center’s 300 operators make thousands of calls a day to bank customers around the nation who have exceeded their credit limits or missed a payment.

Initially, Wexler left the bank’s phone number on the outgoing message of her answering machine, but the strategy did little to alleviate the problem.

“They’d say: ‘Oh, you’re not in right now. I’ll call you back,’ ” she said. “A lot of people don’t know it’s about their credit cards so they don’t think my message (giving out the bank’s phone number) is for them.”

Bank policy prohibits operators from leaving messages containing confidential credit information on customers’ answering machines, said John Rousseau, the bank’s senior vice president. As a result, operators are told simply to identify themselves and the bank and to leave a phone number, he said.

Wexler, a part-time grants researcher for nonprofit companies, said she was amused when she first started receiving the calls. A couple of men who liked the sound of her voice appeared to want to ask her for dates. “They would say: ‘Hi, I have no idea what this is about, but yeah, give me a call,’ ” she said. “My boyfriend nicknamed them ‘the overspending yuppies.’ ”

One worried caller turned out to be a friend of one of her cousins. “He was really embarrassed when he found out it was me,” she said.

But soon the calls got out of hand. One distraught woman left a tearful message saying her daughter had just died and that she didn’t have enough money to pay the bill.

Some days, Wexler would get as many as 20 calls from bank card customers. Sometimes the messages were mean. Occasionally, the phone rang as early as 2 a.m.

Fed up with the situation, Wexler began leaving nasty messages of her own. In one of her saltier messages she said: “I don’t (care) about your credit card problems. Just pay your damn bills.”

After an angry caller threatened that he would find out where she lives and kill her, she quickly replaced that message with a friendlier one, she said.

She also wrote three letters to the bank and made several phone calls urging bank officials to do something about the problem. The bank customers, however, kept calling.

One bank employee told her to change her phone number, but she didn’t think that it should be her responsibility and expense, she said.

The bank has no record of her letters and calls, and Wexler does not recall the names of any of the bank officials she spoke to.

After a reporter brought Wexler’s problem to the attention of senior bank officials, two memos were circulated reminding operators to leave the right area code when they make their calls. On Wednesday afternoon, Rousseau personally contacted Wexler, promising that he would try to pinpoint the problem in the next few days. He also told her he would “see what we can do” about getting her a credit card.

“I don’t care if it’s a guilt door prize--I would take it,” said Wexler.