Apartment Complex Says My Daughter Owes $8k But She Never Signed A Lease?

Location: Texas

A couple of years ago my daughter was attending a large university, most of the town is geared towards this school for context. She started looking for apartments. She found a complex and completed their application. She didn't have a job so they told her she needed a guarantor. She reached out to me, I looked into the complex and found it has bad reviews so I told her we should look elsewhere. She gave them my name and email during this process. She never signed a lease, we moved on.

A year later I get an email "you owe $6k because you didn't satisfy the terms of your lease". I call my daughter and ask her, you didn't sign a lease, right? she says no. Turns out she can still log in to their system where she completed her application and it shows as "not submitted" on the lease. It's an expensive college so I figure this is their grift, have panicked parents pay this when they don't owe it. We check our credit, nothing is there, decide to ignore them.

Now we find out that they sent this to a debt collector who sent letters to her old address and it's now on her credit. Letters came last year so we are outside the normal window to dispute with the debt collector. It's not on my credit because I never gave them any of my info, which was supposedly necessary to get the lease..

Does anyone know the law on this? How can we owe for a lease that was never signed? If they really expected us to follow through on this "lease" why did they never give any move in information? Unit or key information? We heard nothing until "you owe us".