Found Your (In)Voice

(As the accounting clerk for my office, I have to watch out for scammers trying to defraud us. One scammer kept sending invoices that claimed to be from the yellow pages, but contained multiple misspellings, and went to a random PO box in Florida. I’d just been shredding them for over a year, but this month I decided to reply. In a formal letter on our letterhead, I wrote:)

Letter: “Neither our facility, nor our parent company, nor any affiliate thereof, requested to be included in your supposed directory. This invoice is illegitimate, and void. Any further attempts to bill us for unrequested services will be referred to the Better Business Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission. Cease and desist immediately. A word of advice: when you try scamming companies, your odds would be much better if you actually got the name of your target right. Not only are you crooks, you’re incompetent crooks. Kindly do the world a favor and go get eaten by an alligator.”

(That felt good.)