In January 2009, a friend of mine cancelled her AOL Broadband and moved to a new ISP. Somewhat to her surprise, everything went smoothly ... until June, when she received a dunning letter from a debt collection agency, called Advantis, warning her that her debt (of about £90) to AOL must be paid in full immediately in order to avoid legal action.
This was the first she’d ever heard of any “debt” - she was quite sure she didn't owe AOL anything. Suspecting a scam (she is a pensioner, so a fairly likely target), she googled “Advantis scam,” which led her to two very useful websites (this one, and a BBC Watchdog one). From these she was able to put together a “prove it” letter, like this:
Dear Sir/Madam
I have received a letter from you today, in which you claim to be acting on behalf of AOL to collect a debt.
To the best of my knowledge, no such debt exists.
As you are aware, under the terms of OFT Guidance you are in breach if you pursue third parties for payments for which they are not liable. In not ceasing collection activity whilst investigating a reasonably queried or disputed debt you are using deceptive/and or unfair methods.
Furthermore ignoring and/or disregarding claims that debts have been settled or are disputed and continuing to make unjustified demands for payment amounts to physical/psychological harassment, and is actionable under law.
Under law, you are required to provide me, within 28 days of receipt of this letter, a copy of the original statement of account showing how this amount has been calculated, or else your confirmation in writing that this matter is now closed.
I instruct you not to contact me again other than to prove that this debt is owed, or to confirm that the matter is now closed. If you do so, you will be in breach, and I will immediately make a formal complaint to your company, to the Trading Standards Department, and to the OFT.
Yours faithfully
The result was satisfactory: Advantis immediately wrote back, saying they were dropping the claim. Lesson one: calling their bluff can work. At the same time, she wrote to AOL, asking them what this supposed debt was, and why they hadn't simply asked her, even once, to pay it, before passing it to a debt collection agency. No reply was ever received from AOL.
So that was that ... until July, when another debt collection gang, calling itself “SRJ Debt Recoveries,” phoned her, chasing the same non-existent debt - a call which my friend (who is ex-directory, by the way) found so threatening that she was left shaking and in tears. The man who phoned warned her darkly that “This isn't going to go away, you know,” but when she asked him for his name, he refused to give it, and when she insisted, he hung up the phone. (Just to stress the point: these are the kind of people that a major company like AOL chooses to do business with.)
This was followed up by a letter from the same company, warning that “Our client, AOL, has attempted to contact you on numerous occasions to arrange payment terms on the above outstanding debt. As you have failed to respond to correspondence, we have found it necessary to make tracing enquiries for confirmation of your current place of residence. It has been confirmed that you are in fact resident at the above address, and therefore we have concluded that you are choosing to ignore the repeated requests for payment. In the circumstances we are instructed that court proceedings should be issued without further delay.”
By now, she was really quite frightened. This seemed like some kind of Kafkaesque nightmare from which it was hard to imagine how to escape. Remember, AOL had never contacted her about this debt - naturally enough, since the debt didn't exist!
She wrote another “prove it” letter, this time to the new debt recovery mob, and wrote again to AOL. AOL never replied. Incredibly, SRJ phoned again - luckily, thanks to call screening, she knew who it was and didn’t answer. In desperation, she wrote to her local MP, asking for his help. This did the trick: the harassment stopped, and AOL eventually wrote to her admitting that she didn’t owe them anything, and offering a somewhat half-hearted apology.
Lesson two: get your MP involved immediately; these companies evidently respond to MPs, but they don’t respond to mere customers. Presumably, that is a matter of policy.
Hilariously, the letter from AOL’s Head of Complaints also promised that “Your feedback has been duly noted,” and that the company was committed to “listening to our members.” Even more hilariously, they said they were unable to reply directly to the MP, due to data privacy regulations ... which doesn’t seem to have worried them when they were commissioning debt collection agencies to chase fictional debts.
On reflection, my friend really didn't feel this was good enough; she wrote to AOL again, asking whether they planned to compensate her, if not for the weeks of considerable mental distress which their alleged clerical error had caused her, at least for the time and money she had been forced to spend on all those letters and phone calls. No, was AOL’s reply, because the policy was that “AOL Broadband do not compensate for resolving the complaint.”
So ... an incredible series of barely believable mistakes? Or a scam, which relies on a percentage of frail victims paying up simply to make the thing go away? I have no idea. One thing I do know is, anyone who has anything to do with AOL UK is an idiot.
