My employer received a couple of past-due notices from Aspen Publishers, a company that sells business publications. I called them and was faxed copies of two invoices that were unpaid. The invoices listed the publications and prices, to the tune of about $500. However, the invoices did not show a purchase order #, and the contact name on the invoices was a former employee who hadn't worked for my employer in approximately 8 years. I relayed this to their Customer Service dept., but she insisted that our former employee had indeed ordered these publications. When I asked why there was no purchase order #, she told me we had not given them one. I told her we give every vendor a PO # when placing an order, otherwise how would we track which goods were received and can be paid? After arguing with her a few minutes I hung up.
I called back the next day and got someone else, who did some digging and determined that they didn't even ship the publications they were billing us for. That's right, they invoiced us for something we never bought. The former employee in this case must have ordered something 8 years ago, and someone at Aspen sent us a dummy invoice, hoping we would pay it. They are now on my sh! T list of vendors (an ever-growing list) whose invoices are gone over with a fine-toothed comb in order to verify that everything is legit.
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