• recklessengagement@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    We got a “bill” from a company like this that wanted ~300 bucks to “list your companies name on our website”. That was it. You paid them, and you got added to the list of accountants that didn’t read the fine print. Pretty clever, if obnoxious.

    • kautau@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      This is common with domain registrations too. They will mail an unsuspecting company a request to pay for “continued domain protection” for a domain close to expiration, which means literally paying them to send another letter when the domain is up for renewal again. The don’t do anything with the domain, you just pay them to mail you letters when it’s close to expiring

    • LufyCZ@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Think the difference there is that the invoices of the guy from the article were actually fake invoices for real things

      • TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        Still not advisable… You receive an invoice after services are rendered, not beforehand. Presenting an invoice for services not previously agreed upon would still be fraud, and unless the company personally wrote you a check, it’s either mail fraud or wire fraud.

        So you have similar/more legal risks as a bank robber, but you’re doing it for petty cash?

  • Agent641@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    In Australia this is called speculative invoicing, and its illegal. A company I was working for was doing SI for support contracts, regardless if the client was active with us or not and regardless of they even owned or used the tech that we supported.

    My boss was just sending this shit out without telling the service department and without providing us a copy of the support contract and then we got angry calls from former clients and we didn’t know why or what the support contract covered. Eventually I figured out what was going on, and when a call came in, I’d repeat the speil - the invoice is optional, it only covers X, if you dont have X then you dont need support for it, here’s the phone number of the boss.

    Sure enough, when the boss started getting angry phone calls while he was off fishing and treating his business like a passive income, he was angry at me.

    He didnt fire me though, I eventually left and took a big chunk of his neglected legit clients.