A very non-descript white #10 business envelope with a see-through address window came in my mail this morning from something I'd never heard of called "Corporate Regulatory Committee" at 1118 Lancaster Drive #369, Salem OR 97301."
"Looks official. Who's that?" I wondered. Turns out to be a variant on the old phone directory billing scam, where people you've never heard of send you an oh-so-official looking letter that very much makes it seem like you already owe them money.
Somewhere buried in the verbiage of all these things (amidst all the humorous spelling mistakes, like "procedding" -- how many can you find?) is usually some sort of phrase that explains, to the alert reader, that you don't actually owe anything and that this whole thing has no real connection to the organization that the rest of the hit piece is intended to make you think it's from.
Plenty of people get scammed by these sorts of things, even some pretty bright but busy people. Don't be one of them. If you get a letter like this, do not pay, of course, but also do not throw it away. Instead, keep it, and alert the Attorney General and the Secretary of State.
(No doubt you'll not be surprised to find that 1118 Lancaster Drive is a private mailbox business, so there's another violation, this one of postal rules, which are that PMBs are supposed to put PMB in their return address.)
"Looks official. Who's that?" I wondered. Turns out to be a variant on the old phone directory billing scam, where people you've never heard of send you an oh-so-official looking letter that very much makes it seem like you already owe them money.
Somewhere buried in the verbiage of all these things (amidst all the humorous spelling mistakes, like "procedding" -- how many can you find?) is usually some sort of phrase that explains, to the alert reader, that you don't actually owe anything and that this whole thing has no real connection to the organization that the rest of the hit piece is intended to make you think it's from.
Plenty of people get scammed by these sorts of things, even some pretty bright but busy people. Don't be one of them. If you get a letter like this, do not pay, of course, but also do not throw it away. Instead, keep it, and alert the Attorney General and the Secretary of State.
(No doubt you'll not be surprised to find that 1118 Lancaster Drive is a private mailbox business, so there's another violation, this one of postal rules, which are that PMBs are supposed to put PMB in their return address.)
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