• LufyCZ@lemmy.world
      112·
      9 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
        23·
        9 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?

        • workerONE@lemmy.world
          15·
          9 months ago

          You should be able to send a letter that serves as a contract, and include an invoice to pay to start the contract. Then legally it would rely on the type of service you offer, but as far as invoicing before service starts that’s not legally a problem. They used to mail out magazine subscription offers, you would mail in a check and then your subscription would start.

          • TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
            1·
            9 months ago

            You should be able to send a letter that serves as a contract, and include an invoice to pay to start the contract.

            Yeah, but including a letter clearly explaining a service contract isn’t going to fool many accountants. And if it’s not clearly stated in the contact letter what exactly the invoice is for, it’s still fraud.

            If you’re going to commit fraud, just don’t do it by mail/wire. Federal prosecutors have a 95% conviction rate, and the maximum sentence for mail fraud is ten years longer than bank robbery.

  • recklessengagement@lemmy.world
    124·
    9 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
      66·
      9 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

        • frezik@midwest.social
          11·
          9 months ago

          The whois data is usually anonymized these days. However, there are companies that forget to check that box.

          Spammers often deliberately make their messages full of spelling and grammatical errors because they want to target people who are just that naive. Might have a similar thing going on here.

        • kautau@lemmy.world
          2·
          9 months ago

          Nowadays any registrar worth their salt will provide free Whois protection for TLDs that support it, but it was absolutely a racket at the time

  • Agent641@lemmy.world
    105·
    9 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.

    • Bob@feddit.nl
      6·
      9 months ago

      off fishing and treating his business like a passive income

      What a fucking waste. You scam your way into all this free time and you go and sit aimlessly by the water until a brief moment where you can torture a fish. What a man.

  • yamanii@lemmy.world
    41·
    9 months ago

    This is a thing in Brazil, as soon as you open up a business you receive random bills from people like OP, people that are starting out and have no experience do pay.

  • MrJameGumb@lemmy.world
    32·
    9 months ago

    It’s a great plan with one fatal flaw: I’d rather just pay the bill than have to deal with getting hauled in to small claims court

      • euphoric.cat@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        21·
        9 months ago

        dont go on ebay, and dont lookup any tech item of choice, and dont make sure its a relatively recent and you cant see a serial number. dont copy that serial number into the warranty and replacements part of the companys website to check if its in warranty. dont ask for a replacement unit and dont ask them for other options when they ask you to send the faulty unit back. dont keep or sell the product when it arrives. stealing from large corporations is never okay.

        • dutchkimble@lemy.lol
          6·
          9 months ago

          Assuming we didn’t do this, but won’t the large company check the address belongs to the actual person before not sending us the replacement because we didn’t do it anyway? Also won’t they insist for the faulty unit, what other options will they accept? Asking for writing a book on hypothetical scenarios