On Oct. 18, my wife received a "request for payment" notice from North Shore Agency (NSA) dated Oct. 10. The "amount due" was $11.88. NSA's informed us that "our client, Prevention Magazine, requested that we send you this notice to verify that this matter is unresolved. They claim to have sent you a number of letters, but to date, the matter is unresolved." Continuing, NSA wrote that "The purpose of this letter is to verify that Prevention Magazine has not received payment for the magazines you ordered and they shipped to you and to give you this opportunity to resolve this matter." My wife was offered the "opportunity" to pay Rodale, Inc., the publishers of Prevention Magazine, $11.88.
Here are the facts: We received one unsolicited copy of Prevention in the mail. We glanced at it and then tossed it. My wife began receiving bills from Prevention Magazine. Since she never in fact "ordered" the magazine, we threw out the bills. Then NSA's notice arrived.
Instead of throwing NSA's notice away, we did the following:
1. Sent a reply saying that my wife had not ordered a subscription to Prevention and would not pay their alleged bill.
2. Filed complaints against NSA and Rodale with the attorney generals of California and the state of New York.
3. Followed up with certified, return-receipt-requested letters to NSA and Rodale demanding that they produce a copy of a subscription contract, per the U.S. Fair Debt Collections Act.
I'm hopeful that this will be enough to convince them to leave us alone. This is clearly a big scam. They're dunning people for relatively small amounts of cash and hoping they'll just pay up to get rid of them. A few bucks here and a few bucks there, and pretty soon you're talking about serious money!
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