Saturday, November 19, 2005

Stop! Stop! Thief!

Well, it's been a whirlwind around here the last 24 hours. Andrew comes come last night, brings in the mail, and the checking account statement is in the mail. I open it up, go through it, and find out someone had debited $802.61 from our account on 10/12! Neither Andrew or I had incurred that sort of expense, so we looked up the number next to the transaction line item - AND IT WAS A COLLECTION AGENCY! Now, you have to take into consideration that Andrew and I have absolutely no debts - so there isn't any reason why we would be dealing with a collection agency. We called the number to try and find out what was going on, and the person wanted to know our names, addresses, birthdays, bank account numbers, and became quite belligerent when Andrew wouldn't supply this information - they wouldn't even tell us who or what caused the collection. We said we would take it up with our bank... We did a credit check last night just to be sure, and nothing at all popped up for us. We took all our information to the bank (Thank goodness our bank has Saturday hours!) and they said we will get our money back - and they were appalled that this collection agency was requesting the personal data and wouldn't even doublecheck to see if we were the people who caused it. The bank said most likely it was a mix-up with the bank account number because collection agencies can't debit your account without your permission. So... it has been very stressful around here.

You know what annoys me - that there will never be any apology of any kind from the collection agency. This isn't an interest-bearing account - but what if it was? And what if that amount of money constituted the majority of our savings and it was - in effect - stolen?

SP5 - I know you don't know who I am yet, but I hope you understand that this is why your last package didn't get put into today's mail. It will get mailed on Monday.

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