We received this letter in the mail today:

"After a review of your file we find a balance of $3,987.15. Please pay that amount by cashier's check of money order to "Miller and Steeno, P.C." and make sure our file number (######) is on your payment to ensure you get credit. If you are unable to pay in full, call this office immediately to set up a payment plan.

If you fail to pay the amount due or fail to set up a payment plan, further action will be taken without notice."

It was addressed to my wife. Since we both have stellar credit and have never paid a payment on anything late, I suspected this was either a scam or a case of mistaken identity. My guess is that this firm is trying to find this person who happens to have the same first name and maiden name that my wife does, so they thought they'd just send a threatening demand letter and hope that someone paid it.

This type of collections is absolutely despicable. This is no longer a creditor trying to get paid. This is a creditor selling a years-old debt to an agency for pennies on the dollar, and the agency will do whatever it can to try to make the smallest amount of profit. It's pathetic and any attorney who runs this type of business is a piece of shit.

Since I knew this was not a legitimate debt, I called the number. The girl who answered the phone, an uneducated, ignorant-sounding girl who couldn't have been older than 18/19, told me the details of the debt. It was almost five years old, so the agency was desperate to try to get some payment on this debt before the 5-year statute of limitations ran out.

It was supposedly a credit card from a bank that neither of us had ever heard of. I explained that they either have the wrong person or they have a fraudulent account. I suggested that she fax me any documentation they have on file so that I can investigate this, and that's when it became obvious how little information they must have had.

"Ummm, well, ummm, why don't I just mark this as a disputed amount and let my management take care of it? I think they'll just take it off the books."

"You don't want to fax me over documentation? If you guys have something that proves it's my wife's, and I'm wrong, we'll pay it. We don't default on payments."

"No, it's okay. I'll just let my boss take care of it and it will probably just go away."

If they had anything – a signature, a check showing the last payment, billing addresses that corresponded with my wife's known addresses – they would have sent it to me. This means that they probably had an amount, a name, and maybe a SSN, and they were trying to bully her into paying just by sending a threatening letter. I guarantee that if I had called up and said that I didn't want them to take further action and wanted to pay whatever I could, they would have jumped all over themselves to take $500 or $1,000 to "clean up" this potentially negative mark from our credit report.

Parasites like this agency prey on unsuspecting consumers and try to frighten them into paying anything. I had an employee who had that happen and she was practically in tears about a debt that wasn't hers. The agency set a court date and if I hadn't set her up with a lawyer, they would have walked all over her. It turned out that they had absolutely no documentation at all and the judge threw it out almost instantly. There were at least 50 other people there, though, most of whom did not have legal representation, and they were meeting with the lawyer for the agency and trying to make payment arrangements rather than fight it.

Fucking pathetic. Fuck you, Miller and Steeno, P.C.

In other Avitanews, there will be no radio show on Wednesday night. Britt has guests coming into town and so she will be unable to co-host, so I thought I'd just abstain from doing a show. Nobody wants to just listen to me talk by myself for an hour!