Heh.

Never let a collection agency bully you.
My wife has been trying to get a collection agency to explain to her exactly why Ameritech (which SBC bought out several years ago, giving you an idea how long this has been going on) had sent to collections a billing for her old number at her former apartment for something like $400, as she had disconnected that number at the end of May, 2000 when she vacated the apartment. The final bill was paid in full.
The collection agency, after two years of diddling around with SBC, has finally come up with a copy of the bill. But they told her that if they sent her the bill for her to look at, she would be expected to pay the full amount within 72 hours.
Sally called bullshit. “If you send me that bill, what makes you think I’m going to meekly roll over and pay it? I may decide not to pay it, since I don’t think I owe the money to begin with.”
The response was, “Well, we had to pay Ameritech to get a copy of this bill.”
So Sally called her lawyer this morning and he said, you call them back and tell them that they must provide you with proof of documentation, and they had to suspend collections when you contested it in the first place. The fact that it took them nearly two years to get a copy of the bill out of Ameritech’s ridiculous billing system isn’t your problem. So it is illegal to tell you that you have to pay within 72 hours — and besides, 72 hours from what? From them sending it, or from you receiving it? — since at this point they are not in a position to demand such.
So she’s going to call the collection agency back and pretty much tell them either send the bill and wait for me to decide if I’m going to pay it, or you can talk to my lawyer (who is an old family friend and will do this work pro bono, I’m sure).
This should be interesting. And if this is a bullshit billing, you can bet that we’re going to complain to the IURC (for the phone bill) and to the Secretary of State (for the assholishness of the collection agency). In point of fact we will probably complain anyway, at the very least because of the way the collection agency has jerked us around for two years.
The other question that remains is, if she owed that much money to Ameritech, why in hell didn’t they disconnect her for non-payment? I know far too many people who got on the wrong end of that argument. If they paid their bill a day late, they got dropped. So the whole thing is just very, very strange. (It did occur to me that she might have downloaded some dialbot that was calling 900 numbers all day while she was at work, say, the last month she was in the place. But if that’s the case, I can’t understand why the dialbot didn’t continue to work here after she moved in and hooked her computer up to my phone line…)
As they say, “Developing…”
[Later: Jeebus, it’s worse than I thought. It’s Asset Acceptance Corp. who’s calling her. Do a google on them and see what a scummy operation they run. I told Sally to have her lawyer handle this and not to talk to them at all unless he tells her to.]