Received invoice for £6 after a decade

midnitegremlin

Surely a scam???

sgt_bilko_2

midnitegremlin wrote: »

Surely a scam???

I do know the company and we were in touch back in 2004/2005 but I lost patience because they were taking up too much of my time for no result.

It could be they have spent a rainy afternoon dreaming up ways to make money and thought they could take a shot at sending out hundreds or thousands of bogus requests for small amounts dating back several years in the hope that a large number would simply pay up.

If I look at my own business there is just no way I would be going through 10 year old paperwork looking for something I had never billed and I would be too embarrassed to send out an invoice for £6.00 with repeated follow up requests.

midnitegremlin

Weirdness all round! But if it IS a scam, I reckon 100s will have paid and said "why not, it's only £6." Just to be clear, do you think you might actually owe it, or is it likely made up?

sgt_bilko_2

It could well be a deliberate scam and as you say many would pay up just to get rid of them, especially if they received a few annoying follow ups.

My suspicion is that they are in a desperate state financially and possibly near collapse so they have gone trawling through anything and everything looking for any excuse to bill people no matter how spurious.

Maybe they honestly do feel they are owed £6.00 but what sort of normal business goes back through ten year old records and then sends out half a dozen email reminders for this sort of money? It strikes me they are beyond caring what sort of impression they create with other people in the same business.

fatbelly

sgt_bilko wrote: »

Sorry for not replying earlier but I did not receive any notifications of further forum posts. In response to the point by Million Percent that:

"They are still entitled to hassle you directly for payment within the limits of the law."

Surely the whole point of something being statute barred is that they cannot hassle you after 6 years because continued requests are deemed by law to be harassment.

.

What you are referring to is the FCA guidance which Fermi has outlined in the letter in post #2

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/2606811

"...a firm must not attempt to recover a statute barred debt in England, Wales or Northern Ireland if the lender or owner has not been in contact with the customer during the limitation period." 7.15.4

"A firm must not continue to demand payment from a customer after the customer has stated that he will not be paying the debt because it is statute barred." 7.15.8

But I'm not sure what pressure the FCA could bring on a company based in Canada.

midnitegremlin

sgt_bilko wrote: »

Maybe they honestly do feel they are owed £6.00 but what sort of normal business goes back through ten year old records and then sends out half a dozen email reminders for this sort of money?

Do you think it could be a debt that you actually owe? It is weird as heck though. What kind of company are they? Are we allowed to ask? :undecided

sgt_bilko_2

It's an online photo library that helps photographers to sell images to customers but then collects a commission for each sale. I am a photographer and remember leaving them because they hadn't made a single sale after a year but they were wasting a lot of my time with stupid requests for complex images with tiny budgets.

If I did owe them money for a sale they should have known that immediately and billed me at the time. That's why it doesn't add up that they are sending out invoices ten years later for such small sums with repeated follow ups. They even added a heavy handed note to remind me that any bank charges were my responsibility when sending money.

As a business you have to keep records for five years but nobody in their right mind is going back ten years and sending out invoices to people they haven't even heard from in a decade. For all I know perhaps they are also sending out invoices to others dating back 15 or 20 years with threats of further action. Their whole approach is quite unlike anything I have encountered in 25 years of business, so I figure they are either crazy or desperate.

midnitegremlin

Well, at least it's a "legit" bill ha ha! What a sham!!! I'd pay it though, and be done with it.

sgt_bilko_2

Just as an update on this I sent the company an email stating there had been no contact for 10 years and I had no record of the suggested transaction so I therefore considered it to be statute barred.

I finished the email with a request not to waste any more of my time and haven't heard another word since then. Hopefully that will be the end of the matter but I still think they are one card short of a full deck...