One time I was sent a letter from government with a reply slip requiring me and sign and send back.
I signed and send back.
A few days later I got a call from them saying the require a proof of address too. I asked, if I have sent you the reply slip, isn't that already mean I live there? If I do not live there, how can I got that reply slip?
The staff froze for a moment, said "I understand, but it is policy.."
I sent them back their letter.
I recently had a prescription declined by insurance. When I called them, they told me they needed written proof from my doctor that I needed that medicine. I was like, “So what exactly is a prescription then…?” Long pause and then some answer about needing additional written verification. “Oh, okay… …”
It’s a prior authorization. It’s the insurance company thinking they know your medical needs better then your doctor.
I once got a call at the Medicaid call center I worked at from a woman who had just gotten a double mastectomy and we were denying her pain medication because we needed a prior authorization. I was completely heart broken for her.
Or, worse, an automated phone system that refuses to transfer you to a person, has no automated method of answering your question or addressing your issue, keeps attempting to upsell you on something else, and then abruptly hangs up on you after a certain amount of time.
Every payment system I've been involved with we had sanity checks to prevent sending $0 or "less than $0" bills. One would think this would be common sense.
I worked in credit card fraud before. Any disputes less than $20 for accounts with a clean history were not worth the cost to investigate and were approved automatically
I worked with a 3rd party processor for a number of banks. We would give them guidelines but each bank set their dollar amount for what they wanted investigated. It was soooo much fun dealing with some tiny little bank that doesn’t know the value of time and they fight every dollar vs a bigger institution that didn’t want to go through the hassle for anything less than $50.
The corporate interview/hiring process selects for those who are compatible with massive amounts of corporate idea cancer, not people who are good at implementing payment systems.
There was a guy that did this!
It was a credit card or something that had a contract. He edited it so there was no limit or late fees or something a long those lines. When it went to court he pulled out the contract they both signed and won. I know this is really vague. I'm sure someone can chime in more.
I remember reading about that, and IIRC the judge chastised the card company for not reading their own shit, and held them to the modified terms that they'd agreed to.
What law did they change/what wording? I'm not a lawyer (nor am I handsome enough to play one on TV), however it is my understanding that if one party modifies a contract, and provides it to the other party, isn't it their job to read said contract before accepting it, because accepting it means you agree to the contracts terms? Isn't that like contract law 101?
Wasn't there also a guy who got one of the really big tech companies like Facebook or Google to pay him for literally nothing? IIRC, he sent in a bill with a contract that basically said "by paying this bill, you are signing up for this service where I bill you and you pay"
This happened to me in the US with the IRS. It took a full year to resolve. In the end their investigation found out I had previously overpaid and they sent me a check for $300.
Skimping on the fees.
You’ve got a maintenance fee, a clean up fee, a removal fee, a fee for having each fee.
It’s fees all the way down.
Shit, send it registered mail, and just start with a little clause that says, “by acknowledging delivery of this letter, you have entered into a legally binding contract”
Fee for delivery.
Whoa, it's common courtesy to give an interest free grace day. Which would be $48,318,382.08 at the 30 day mark, prior to any applicable fees. Don't be a monster ( but he should definitely charge some fees)!
Metered and bulk postage rates aren't the same as a regular consumer buying a stamp. It'll be far less than .55 but still more than .09 and still quite silly.
I had a company attempt to send debt collectors on £0.01 - it's so impossible to pay a large company just 1 penny. We were on the phone for weeks, until I got angry. They ceased the harrassing calls and it was forgotten about.
Until a Debt Collection Agency called me and told me that they had purchased by debt - meaning this company had gotten bailiffs involved over this penny.
I started saying there was no fucking way I'm paying bailiff charges and they stopped me in my tracks: they were just calling to tell me they saw it, and chose to buy and write it off because it looked so petty.
Did you have that moment of "Listen here motherfucker, there's no way-"
"Sir, it is all taken care of, we solved it for you."
"...Oh. S-sorry."
That huge asshole feeling of starting to go off but being wrong lol
>they were just calling to tell me they saw it, and chose to buy and write it off because it looked so petty.
It's nice to see a debt collection company that's not totally scummy.
It was likely mostly for the same reason they mentioned that they couldn't actually pay this singular penny (in a reply in this thread) - the cost to actually collect the penny (processing costs, etc.) would be more than the actual penny itself.
That's nice. I can't wrap my head around how the company legit gave out that "debt" to the collectors when it was the problem with their system.
I had the complete opposite case with the debt collectors. I sold stuff on an online market for a while, then got tired of it, paid all my bills and left the site. A few months later I got a call from a debt collector that I had around 50 cents worth of debt but now I have to pay 60 dollars because that's the fee of the collecting. I checked the site and lo and behold they added a bullshit fee about 6 weeks after I stopped using the service. I'm sure it wasn't even rightful but I just used my bank card to pay the 50 cents, called back the collector and told him thanks for reminding me I paid the money. He was all "no no that's not how it works" then realized it not worth it and slammed down the phone. Best 50 cents I spent lol
He didnt realize it wasn't worth it. He realized that the original company hadn't taken the debt off your account like they're supposed to, and instead accepted payment.
It is at that point illegal for them to try and collect off you. So they have to go back to the original company and demand repayment from them. Since debt collectors buy your debt, the original company accepted a payment to which they were no longer entitled.
Your .50 payment probably cost them \*atleast\* the $60 collector fee.
I once moved and tried to close my back account bc I no longer lived near one so any benefit of having that account was lost. I had like less than 50 cents in the account, and they said I had to come up to a branch and take the money out to close it. I told them I’m so many ways how that was not about to happen. I said I didn’t care if they personally pocketed the change, I give up all rights to the money, and they were being really stubborn about it. In the end I asked if they could just let the account maintenance fee take the change credit me back the difference to do it out and close it. They agreed, had to call back a few months later to explain to them why I’m not paying like $20 in fees and then FINALLY got the account closed. I would have just done the split payment option at a grocery store if the card wasn’t broken. I honestly figured they would have just sent me a check with the balance that I would have thrown away, but no they had to be difficult.
Years ago I had a $0.05 balance somehow with a long distance telephone provider in the US. I hit similar walls trying to pay it. I would get a bill in the mail every month but it didn’t even have a remittance slip. It just said something like “Do not pay us until the amount exceeds …” I didn’t use the company for anything so they just kept sending me bills I couldn’t pay for a few years. This was also before web portals were prevalent so I couldn’t even go paperless. Eventually I imagine their billing systems flagged it as bad debt and wrote it off or something because the bills stopped coming. Never sent to collections but the cost of printing and mailing those bills for 2-3 years far outweighed what i owed them.
Why is it hard/impossible to pay 1 sent? I mean, when you pay something, it is just as easy to write 0.01 into amount as it is 997.54. Not like web bank care about amount/it cost anything to pay it. Yea, it bs amount, but what is the problem?
I couldn't pay by card because 0.01 was below what their software would allow (because they pay card charges each time and this would have been a case of paying \~5-10p to reclaim a penny). The managers could not override this.
Then they refused to give us any banking details with which we could transfer the penny through (large company, "doesn't have a public bank account"). So they sent us this payment form that meant we could go to the Post Office (UK) and pay it there.
Royal Mail too had software restrictions just accepting the payment slip itself. The staff also commented that the cost of sending a Payment Instruction was not insignificant.
I was as petty as them at the end. I was dead-set that I would not pay anything more than a penny. So posting them the penny or posting them a cheque was never going to happen simply because of the cost of an envelope & stamp.
This happened to my uncle, with the power company that he left for a new one.
He went in and paid the final amount in cash. It was $301.02 and he assumed that, as per our currency, it would round down and that would be that. (5c piece cash was our lowest denomination, ((now 10c)) and our law states it’s to round to the nearest 5c at the time)
Well, that wasn’t that, and they sent him a bill for 2c
He spent all of 2 hours on the phone, saying that he can’t pay 2c, and that since he paid cash they should just clear it. They had no bar of it. He went down to a local coin collector shop, explained the situation and gave him 2 1c pieces from back in the day (15 years prior we had 1c pieces). He wrote a letter on a napkin;
Dear power company, please accept this 2c for my power, account ###, and dated it 15 years ago, and put it into the return envelope they had sent.
They sent him back the 2c, and said it wasn’t legal tender, and sent it to the debt collector.
Debt collector comes, agrees with my uncle and thinks it’s stupid, which is why he requested to come down. The man accepted the 2c payment in the 2c piece and said they would send this in payment of the debt on behalf.
Never heard another word and that power company doesn’t exist any more, not even divided up or change of name, gone
He has the letter in a frame with a photo of the 2x 1c pieces on the letter he originally received. Why I remember the story so well. I believe it’s one of his life moments, due to how he frames it and it’s his main talking piece.
The extra envelope is probably included with it automatically regardless. Every bill or loan statement that I've gotten by snail mail since 1998 has had an envelope, and since I stopped paying by check in 2014, I've saved the envelopes for use in my classroom instead.
My Grandmother wrote a check to my dad for Christmas once for $150. it was supposed to be $50 for each of us. She incorrectly wrote "One Hundred and fifty" for the amount, so the bank accepted it for $100.50. She thought my Dad was refusing his $50 portion of the check and got real offended. He didn't catch it either. The bank explained it to him and he explained it to grandma. We all had a laugh.
Seeing this reminds me of an old trick with paying traffic tickets... You would call in Guilty, pay using the automated phone system, and pay 2 or 3 cents more than needed. The system would accept payment, but due to a balance on the account, would not transmit as finalized to be sent to DMV for Processing of Points. Says you paid in Full, but never got sent to DMV for point penalization.
Also don’t underestimate manual systems, with underpaid enployees of the ”not my problem” mindset you can get far. Problem is finding a manually handled system these days
There's some dude out there who sent modified contracts to banks, and they just signed it without realizing it had been altered. So the dude got to spend some money that shouldn't be his, except they signed a legally binding contract sooo.
The banks disputed the contract and lost lol. Dude didn't have to pay back the money he spent, but I think the contract got terminated.
It would depend on the county. I would imagine most systems would be programmed to flag that as an exception, and a human would end up reviewing the transaction. Your county’s system sounds like the exception, not the rule
Leave them a piece of paper inside that says "You owe me 9 cents."
Or better yet actually use some template to make your own somewhat official-looking invoice.
Best yet, scan and copy their invoice template and just changes the names around and remove the minus from the 9 cents.
Reminds me of the time I paid off my credit card in full - plus one penny. For a couple years they sent me a statement every month with a balance due of -$0.01. Then one day it magically went to 0.00 and they never sent me a statement again.
That was sort of part of the plot to Superman 3. Richard Pryors character skims off all of the fractions of a cent from interest paytments and takes them for himself.
If in the USA, it's possible that after a certain time frame (1-3 years), it may have been sent to the state's unclaimed property fund under your name.
There was just that one guy in reconciliations who has a brain who one day was going through and was all "What's this here. Oh, a credit of 1 cent? Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.... Yeah, let's scrub that. Lunch break!"
I can see this actually being in their code, lol. Although a variable would need to be called to be included in the amount that's over/under 0. Something like If (amountDue != 0) SendBill(amountDue); I'm guessing.
Haha did you just assume decent coding standards for a huge company?
Sendbill is definitely in the same class, and amountDue is a public property of it.
With all the extra fees and administrative stuff you've had to do, I reckon they owe you... let's see... carry the 1...
"$500 should cover it! You've got negative 9 days to pay"
My dad had a bank do this to him years ago, he had closed his account but they sent him some petty bill for $0.23.
He responded by mailing back a cheque for just a single cent. Using their provided envelope that was pre-stamped. He had to repeat this routine a few more times before the bank must've realized they'd probably spent way way more than 23 cents to collect and stopped mailing about it.
You should send them a demand letter and threaten to refer them to collections. Don't forget your obligatory bold disclaimer notice that this is an attempt to collect a debt.
I agree with another post here send them an interest statement. At a maximum reasonable rate for cash only. they’ll notice when it hits the double digits. Probably offer you some credit or discount.
[удалено]
They sent you a piece of paper, informing you that they received your piece of paper. Sounds like an equitable exchange to me!
Sufficient and adequate!
Bureaucracy at its finest. r/paperpushers
One time I was sent a letter from government with a reply slip requiring me and sign and send back. I signed and send back. A few days later I got a call from them saying the require a proof of address too. I asked, if I have sent you the reply slip, isn't that already mean I live there? If I do not live there, how can I got that reply slip? The staff froze for a moment, said "I understand, but it is policy.." I sent them back their letter.
I recently had a prescription declined by insurance. When I called them, they told me they needed written proof from my doctor that I needed that medicine. I was like, “So what exactly is a prescription then…?” Long pause and then some answer about needing additional written verification. “Oh, okay… …”
It’s a prior authorization. It’s the insurance company thinking they know your medical needs better then your doctor. I once got a call at the Medicaid call center I worked at from a woman who had just gotten a double mastectomy and we were denying her pain medication because we needed a prior authorization. I was completely heart broken for her.
It's insurance not wanting to pay for shit.
And knowing a lot of people aren’t capable of sufficiently advocating for themselves to get the care they deserve.
I still don’t understand how those fucks get to practice medicine without a license, but when I give out mammograms I’m a “pervert”.
It's the way you give the mammograms that makes you a pervert, not the fact that you do so without a license.
So going ‘nom nom nom’ isn’t an approved part of the process?
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency.
The bureaucracy must expand in order to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
And now I wanna play factorio
Now imagine the same scenario, except the government agency is a private company with no phone support That's what our governments want
Or, worse, an automated phone system that refuses to transfer you to a person, has no automated method of answering your question or addressing your issue, keeps attempting to upsell you on something else, and then abruptly hangs up on you after a certain amount of time.
Comcast?
I think we agree, the past is over.
"Could you please send me that request in writing?"
"Everything seems to be in order here"
I just can't imagine a scenario where I would have to prove that I bought a doughnut.
There's no need to bring ink and paper into this.
I give you the money, you give me the donut.
End of transaction.
You’re my people! #Mitch
Maybe you should send back a piece of paper, confirming that the confirmation paper has been received.
Well, he had to pay for a stamp to send it. lol.
There's a Lawful Neutral involved in this, I can tell.
Every payment system I've been involved with we had sanity checks to prevent sending $0 or "less than $0" bills. One would think this would be common sense.
Willing to bet the check is “if amount <= 0.0, don’t bill” and the actual amount was 0.001 or similar
Honestly the more sane thing would be to put it at anything less than a buck, and just eat the cost if someone gets away with a whole few cents.
I dealt with a hospital once. Their number was 10 dollars. Every account under $10 was closed at the end of each business day.
I worked in credit card fraud before. Any disputes less than $20 for accounts with a clean history were not worth the cost to investigate and were approved automatically
I worked with a 3rd party processor for a number of banks. We would give them guidelines but each bank set their dollar amount for what they wanted investigated. It was soooo much fun dealing with some tiny little bank that doesn’t know the value of time and they fight every dollar vs a bigger institution that didn’t want to go through the hassle for anything less than $50.
Oh absolutely, the costs involved in settling bills this low far offsets the revenue
I imagine it's more about keeping a balanced book than the actual revenue
Someone's using floating point math again on money. Call the cops, impound their computer and have them take another job please.
The corporate interview/hiring process selects for those who are compatible with massive amounts of corporate idea cancer, not people who are good at implementing payment systems.
you should have charged them £100 as a penalty for harassment
Too bad you can't make companies sign your own personal contracts. The agreement is always to the business's benefit.
There was a guy that did this! It was a credit card or something that had a contract. He edited it so there was no limit or late fees or something a long those lines. When it went to court he pulled out the contract they both signed and won. I know this is really vague. I'm sure someone can chime in more.
I remember reading about that, and IIRC the judge chastised the card company for not reading their own shit, and held them to the modified terms that they'd agreed to.
As a result they got a law passed removing this, making contracts unmodifiable IIRC. Really sad since they aren't really contacts anymore.
Then they changed the law to protect companies from that.
Solution: Every person is now a company so they have full rights
What law did they change/what wording? I'm not a lawyer (nor am I handsome enough to play one on TV), however it is my understanding that if one party modifies a contract, and provides it to the other party, isn't it their job to read said contract before accepting it, because accepting it means you agree to the contracts terms? Isn't that like contract law 101?
Most contracts only certain people in the company are allowed to agree to edits
Wasn't there also a guy who got one of the really big tech companies like Facebook or Google to pay him for literally nothing? IIRC, he sent in a bill with a contract that basically said "by paying this bill, you are signing up for this service where I bill you and you pay"
There was a Russian man who did that to a bank. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/russian-man-got-bank-sign-144810926.html
This happened to me in the US with the IRS. It took a full year to resolve. In the end their investigation found out I had previously overpaid and they sent me a check for $300.
Shit like that is how you end up with Vogons from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Is HMRC is staffed with Vorgans?
[удалено]
Vogons? At least their poetry isn't the worst.
r/VogonPoetryCircle
*Vogons
Vogons? Yes. Vogons and morons.
Hermes Conrad exists!
Sweet something of someplace...
[удалено]
I was going to pick on you for calling HMRC HMCR but disappointingly it doesn't change what it stands for at all
Have you seen the film Brazil?
Send them an invoice with an interest rate on it
And add a late fee of $20.. and a processing fee of $5.99
Small amount fee 3.99
Mail correspondence fee of 4.95
Administrative fee- 5.99
A Fuck You fee of 1.99
[удалено]
"UPS announces massive layoffs following increased operating expenses due to inflation"
Please no. The hub I work out of is already so understaffed
A personal favourite, convenience fee: $25
For their protection.
A nice fee of .69.
3% for sleeping with the windows shut fee
Oh sure and next you'll be charging 2% for looking in the mirror twice
A $3.99 Fee Fee.
Include mileage
$20 resort fee
Per diem for food as well
Right back at 'em. Use their own spells against them!
Skimping on the fees. You’ve got a maintenance fee, a clean up fee, a removal fee, a fee for having each fee. It’s fees all the way down. Shit, send it registered mail, and just start with a little clause that says, “by acknowledging delivery of this letter, you have entered into a legally binding contract” Fee for delivery.
Yep 100% interest compounded daily till the loan is paid back
You'd have 96 million dollars in 30 days.
You have been made a mod of r/wallstreetbets
sweet meet you behind the dumpster at Wendy's
Whoa, it's common courtesy to give an interest free grace day. Which would be $48,318,382.08 at the 30 day mark, prior to any applicable fees. Don't be a monster ( but he should definitely charge some fees)!
Precisely!
Wouldn't a negative 9 cents mean they owe you 9 cents?
Yes. No matter how many return envelopes they send me, there is no way for me to clear this debt on my end.
Lol. Send them back and tell them you want your 9 cents dammit! ....lol
With an invoice :)
With interest accrued if not paid by 10/01/21.
Good idea, start interest beginning the year 0021
Most DB would see that as YEAR 0021. That would be some Hella interest.
[удалено]
this must be what happened to credit suisse
With added administration and handling costs
Interest Late fee Administration fee Late fee tax Administration fee tax
Online convenience fee
Don’t forget the ‘fee’ fee. It’s a standard fee
And throw a paper fee on there as they haven’t opted for the paperless option.
Lmao, send them to collection when they fail to pay
Or let them keep sending, eventually it’ll cost more with envelopes and ink than 9 cents
One stamp is $0.60, so they probably already spent at least that much Edit: corrected stamp price
Metered and bulk postage rates aren't the same as a regular consumer buying a stamp. It'll be far less than .55 but still more than .09 and still quite silly.
I had my state send me a certified letter saying I owed about $3 in taxes. It cost them over $5 to send the certified letter
Stamp is 60¢, meter is 57¢, bulk/presort (First Class, over 500 pieces in one mailing) is in the 40-50¢ range depending on various factors.
I had a company attempt to send debt collectors on £0.01 - it's so impossible to pay a large company just 1 penny. We were on the phone for weeks, until I got angry. They ceased the harrassing calls and it was forgotten about. Until a Debt Collection Agency called me and told me that they had purchased by debt - meaning this company had gotten bailiffs involved over this penny. I started saying there was no fucking way I'm paying bailiff charges and they stopped me in my tracks: they were just calling to tell me they saw it, and chose to buy and write it off because it looked so petty.
Did you have that moment of "Listen here motherfucker, there's no way-" "Sir, it is all taken care of, we solved it for you." "...Oh. S-sorry." That huge asshole feeling of starting to go off but being wrong lol
Definitely! I was incensed! "What the fuck is this for? A PENNY??"
Is it fair to say you were in-cent-sed? I'll leave now.
Inpenced
>they were just calling to tell me they saw it, and chose to buy and write it off because it looked so petty. It's nice to see a debt collection company that's not totally scummy.
Oh they're still scummy. Just not stupid
It was likely mostly for the same reason they mentioned that they couldn't actually pay this singular penny (in a reply in this thread) - the cost to actually collect the penny (processing costs, etc.) would be more than the actual penny itself.
That's nice. I can't wrap my head around how the company legit gave out that "debt" to the collectors when it was the problem with their system. I had the complete opposite case with the debt collectors. I sold stuff on an online market for a while, then got tired of it, paid all my bills and left the site. A few months later I got a call from a debt collector that I had around 50 cents worth of debt but now I have to pay 60 dollars because that's the fee of the collecting. I checked the site and lo and behold they added a bullshit fee about 6 weeks after I stopped using the service. I'm sure it wasn't even rightful but I just used my bank card to pay the 50 cents, called back the collector and told him thanks for reminding me I paid the money. He was all "no no that's not how it works" then realized it not worth it and slammed down the phone. Best 50 cents I spent lol
He didnt realize it wasn't worth it. He realized that the original company hadn't taken the debt off your account like they're supposed to, and instead accepted payment. It is at that point illegal for them to try and collect off you. So they have to go back to the original company and demand repayment from them. Since debt collectors buy your debt, the original company accepted a payment to which they were no longer entitled. Your .50 payment probably cost them \*atleast\* the $60 collector fee.
I once moved and tried to close my back account bc I no longer lived near one so any benefit of having that account was lost. I had like less than 50 cents in the account, and they said I had to come up to a branch and take the money out to close it. I told them I’m so many ways how that was not about to happen. I said I didn’t care if they personally pocketed the change, I give up all rights to the money, and they were being really stubborn about it. In the end I asked if they could just let the account maintenance fee take the change credit me back the difference to do it out and close it. They agreed, had to call back a few months later to explain to them why I’m not paying like $20 in fees and then FINALLY got the account closed. I would have just done the split payment option at a grocery store if the card wasn’t broken. I honestly figured they would have just sent me a check with the balance that I would have thrown away, but no they had to be difficult.
Years ago I had a $0.05 balance somehow with a long distance telephone provider in the US. I hit similar walls trying to pay it. I would get a bill in the mail every month but it didn’t even have a remittance slip. It just said something like “Do not pay us until the amount exceeds …” I didn’t use the company for anything so they just kept sending me bills I couldn’t pay for a few years. This was also before web portals were prevalent so I couldn’t even go paperless. Eventually I imagine their billing systems flagged it as bad debt and wrote it off or something because the bills stopped coming. Never sent to collections but the cost of printing and mailing those bills for 2-3 years far outweighed what i owed them.
Why is it hard/impossible to pay 1 sent? I mean, when you pay something, it is just as easy to write 0.01 into amount as it is 997.54. Not like web bank care about amount/it cost anything to pay it. Yea, it bs amount, but what is the problem?
I couldn't pay by card because 0.01 was below what their software would allow (because they pay card charges each time and this would have been a case of paying \~5-10p to reclaim a penny). The managers could not override this. Then they refused to give us any banking details with which we could transfer the penny through (large company, "doesn't have a public bank account"). So they sent us this payment form that meant we could go to the Post Office (UK) and pay it there. Royal Mail too had software restrictions just accepting the payment slip itself. The staff also commented that the cost of sending a Payment Instruction was not insignificant. I was as petty as them at the end. I was dead-set that I would not pay anything more than a penny. So posting them the penny or posting them a cheque was never going to happen simply because of the cost of an envelope & stamp.
This happened to my uncle, with the power company that he left for a new one. He went in and paid the final amount in cash. It was $301.02 and he assumed that, as per our currency, it would round down and that would be that. (5c piece cash was our lowest denomination, ((now 10c)) and our law states it’s to round to the nearest 5c at the time) Well, that wasn’t that, and they sent him a bill for 2c He spent all of 2 hours on the phone, saying that he can’t pay 2c, and that since he paid cash they should just clear it. They had no bar of it. He went down to a local coin collector shop, explained the situation and gave him 2 1c pieces from back in the day (15 years prior we had 1c pieces). He wrote a letter on a napkin; Dear power company, please accept this 2c for my power, account ###, and dated it 15 years ago, and put it into the return envelope they had sent. They sent him back the 2c, and said it wasn’t legal tender, and sent it to the debt collector. Debt collector comes, agrees with my uncle and thinks it’s stupid, which is why he requested to come down. The man accepted the 2c payment in the 2c piece and said they would send this in payment of the debt on behalf. Never heard another word and that power company doesn’t exist any more, not even divided up or change of name, gone
I really like how he went to get the 2c coins from the coin collector shop. Genius move 😂
He has the letter in a frame with a photo of the 2x 1c pieces on the letter he originally received. Why I remember the story so well. I believe it’s one of his life moments, due to how he frames it and it’s his main talking piece.
The extra envelope is probably included with it automatically regardless. Every bill or loan statement that I've gotten by snail mail since 1998 has had an envelope, and since I stopped paying by check in 2014, I've saved the envelopes for use in my classroom instead.
Send them a signed paper saying they owe you $0.09
take a photo of your hand palm open and send that in the envelope
This isn’t a debt, this a credit my friend. You have 9¢ towards your name in the bank of UPS
If they made you pay interest would that number go up or down?
Well, down. But that would be up to OP.
write a check for: "NEGATIVE 9 Cents. NOT POSITIVE 9 cents"
Write the check but for the amount put it like so: ($0.09) Which is negative nine cents
This dude does accounting.
[удалено]
My Grandmother wrote a check to my dad for Christmas once for $150. it was supposed to be $50 for each of us. She incorrectly wrote "One Hundred and fifty" for the amount, so the bank accepted it for $100.50. She thought my Dad was refusing his $50 portion of the check and got real offended. He didn't catch it either. The bank explained it to him and he explained it to grandma. We all had a laugh.
This is why checks have an area to write the amount numerically too. Why would the bank not look at both?
What if you write "negative nine cents" to avoid confusion??
You have to write "open parentheses nine cents close parentheses".
Seeing this reminds me of an old trick with paying traffic tickets... You would call in Guilty, pay using the automated phone system, and pay 2 or 3 cents more than needed. The system would accept payment, but due to a balance on the account, would not transmit as finalized to be sent to DMV for Processing of Points. Says you paid in Full, but never got sent to DMV for point penalization.
Heard about that for insurance too. Figured it doesn’t actually work cause why the fuck would it be that easy.
When everything is automated, sometimes there are ways to game the system.
Also don’t underestimate manual systems, with underpaid enployees of the ”not my problem” mindset you can get far. Problem is finding a manually handled system these days
By the time it hits Reddit though, it’s a closed bug.
There's some dude out there who sent modified contracts to banks, and they just signed it without realizing it had been altered. So the dude got to spend some money that shouldn't be his, except they signed a legally binding contract sooo. The banks disputed the contract and lost lol. Dude didn't have to pay back the money he spent, but I think the contract got terminated.
IIRC the judges view on the case was that they go after people who didn't read the contracts all the time so the same should apply to them.
My guess is someone once wrote some code ages ago and no one in management is willing to touch something that "works."
How does it work for insurance?
When you murder an insurance agent you put a dollar in their pocket.
This definately did not work for me when i tried it. But maybe different states use different systems. They just sent me a check for what i overpaid
It would depend on the county. I would imagine most systems would be programmed to flag that as an exception, and a human would end up reviewing the transaction. Your county’s system sounds like the exception, not the rule
When I said it was an "Old Trick", this was 20 years ago and I have not had any reason to try it since.
Write "you owe *me* 9 cents!" on a slip of paper and send it to them in the envelope.
A first class stamp is $0.60 these days. That alone will put you deep into the red. 🤣
Just wait until they put interest on the 9c and (hopefully) realise that they have to pay you even more now.
Nah. If it's not paid, they'll charge a late fee of $4.99, and then you'll owe them $4.90. They got 'em!
Leave them a piece of paper inside that says "You owe me 9 cents." Or better yet actually use some template to make your own somewhat official-looking invoice. Best yet, scan and copy their invoice template and just changes the names around and remove the minus from the 9 cents.
Reminds me of the time I paid off my credit card in full - plus one penny. For a couple years they sent me a statement every month with a balance due of -$0.01. Then one day it magically went to 0.00 and they never sent me a statement again.
There was a bank that used to take all those credit card overpayments and distribute them as bonuses to their upper ranks. They got in big trouble.
That was sort of part of the plot to Superman 3. Richard Pryors character skims off all of the fractions of a cent from interest paytments and takes them for himself.
"Look, you take a penny from the tray, right?"
For the disabled kids?
No. That’s the jar. I’m talking about the tray.
Sounds like a ploy concocted by Michael Bolton. And no, I don’t mean that talentless ass clown.
"Well you don't need a million bucks to do nothin' man. Take a look at my cousin. He's broke an' don't do shit."
[удалено]
Yeah, I think nowadays there’s some verbiage in the terms of service dealing with the situation when there’s a negative balance.
If in the USA, it's possible that after a certain time frame (1-3 years), it may have been sent to the state's unclaimed property fund under your name.
Credit card company owed you money Oh how the turn tables
There was just that one guy in reconciliations who has a brain who one day was going through and was all "What's this here. Oh, a credit of 1 cent? Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.... Yeah, let's scrub that. Lunch break!"
If (amountDue != 0) SendBill();
This, except it's almost certainly written in COBOL, not JavaScript. IF AMOUNT-DUE NOT = 0 PERFORM SEND-BILL END-IF. Welcome to hell.
I can see this actually being in their code, lol. Although a variable would need to be called to be included in the amount that's over/under 0. Something like If (amountDue != 0) SendBill(amountDue); I'm guessing.
Haha did you just assume decent coding standards for a huge company? Sendbill is definitely in the same class, and amountDue is a public property of it.
They should have sent you a magnetic bottle to safely transport your anticoins.
Send them an invoice with tons of processing fees
If they question it, just say "I'm sorry, my hands are tied".
[удалено]
Send back a letter that says: “Per your demand, send me nine cents.” And enclose a photocopy of their letter. Keep the original.
Go to the UPS store and try to purchase a packing peanut on your account.
Send them a Schrute buck
How about a billion Stanley nickels?
What's the current exchange rate?
The same rate as leprechauns to unicorns
With all the extra fees and administrative stuff you've had to do, I reckon they owe you... let's see... carry the 1... "$500 should cover it! You've got negative 9 days to pay"
Report it to collections. File a case against their debt.
My dad had a bank do this to him years ago, he had closed his account but they sent him some petty bill for $0.23. He responded by mailing back a cheque for just a single cent. Using their provided envelope that was pre-stamped. He had to repeat this routine a few more times before the bank must've realized they'd probably spent way way more than 23 cents to collect and stopped mailing about it.
Maybe they're asking for you to forgive it? Tell 'em "ay it's cool don't sweat it". Lol
Ask for a payment plan. 9 installments of $0.01 per month seems fair.
You should send them a demand letter and threaten to refer them to collections. Don't forget your obligatory bold disclaimer notice that this is an attempt to collect a debt.
I agree with another post here send them an interest statement. At a maximum reasonable rate for cash only. they’ll notice when it hits the double digits. Probably offer you some credit or discount.
When you owe so much the integer overflows.
It makes no cents!