The debt collection proposal is the third major initiative to come out of the consumer bureau this year. In May, it proposed a rule to prohibit mandatory arbitration clauses and to restore customers’ rights to bring class-action lawsuits against companies. Last month, it released a draft of tighter rules covering payday lending that are aimed at keeping low-income people out of an endless cycle of ballooning debt.

The bureau receives far more complaints about debt collection than any other issue — more than 7,000 a month, on average — and 40 percent of them are about collection attempts on debts the customers say they do not owe.

Susan Macharia, 39, an administrative worker who lives in Buena Park, Calif., said she was blindsided in January when she got a call from a collector saying that her wages would be garnished unless she paid off a $10,000 credit card debt that she allegedly ran up in 2003.

A debt so old would normally be beyond the statute of limitations, and legally uncollectable, but the company had a copy of a 2006 default judgment that was entered against her when she failed to respond to a collection lawsuit.

But Ms. Macharia, who opened her first credit card account just three years ago, had no recollection of being notified of a lawsuit, and she was living in Atlanta when the papers were said to have been served on her in California. Fraudulent service is a problem so common it has a name — “sewer service” — derived from the way process servers metaphorically toss the papers they are supposed to deliver into a sewer instead.

While Ms. Macharia tried to figure out how to contest the debt, the collector began garnishing nearly $800 a month from her paychecks.