Multiple SEO companies claiming I have a past-due invoice
Reading stuff like this makes me want to go into the debt collection business. Just send letters to random people demanding money. Sounds like an easy way to make a living. What's your name and address? Just kidding. If they are sending stuff to a Virginia PO Box, close the box with no forwarding address and consider it case closed. If they are targetting you personally in New Hampshire, the best thing to do is to sue proactively before it goes to collection. New Hampshire has strict anti-debt-collection laws. Basically, what you do is go to small claims court and fill out a one-page form. Sue them for $2000, $3000 or whatever is convenient. Do not hire a lawyer. You can do this in 2 hours of your own time. Your grounds are: (1) Violation of the creditor of NH FDCA laws. According to the laws the creditor has to put all kinds of specific stuff in their threat letters. Since they are not doing this, they have violated NH FDCA. Read the FDCA so you know which specific items they are violating. (2) Extortion. Since you do not owe them any money, demanding money from you is extortion which is both criminally and civilly actionable. You sue them for mental anguish due to extortion.  The validity of your claims is irrelevant. You just need to get them in court. There are two possibilities: (A) They fail to show up. In this case you win and they owe you $3000 or whatever. Not only that if they later try to collect from you send a copy of the judgement to the credit bureau or collector or whatever and that is proof you owe them no money. (B) They hire some stooge local lawyer who appears. Accept the court's offer for arbitration. When you go into arbitration with the lawyer tell him you will drop the lawsuit if they send you a check for $500 and a hand-written guarantee from him that you will never hear from his client again. Either way, you come out ahead. By the way, it is absolutely guaranteed that the enemy lawyer will accept your offer in (B) above because the SEO company is already paying him $5000 to show up to answer your lawsuit, and the lawyer does not want to hang around all morning in court waiting for the case to be heard. If he can get out of there in half an hour for only $500 he will do it. -------------------------------UPDATE If all you are getting is calls and the caller refuses to identify themself, then it is definitely an illegal scam. It is illegal in New Hampshire to make collection calls and refuse to full identify who is calling. The phone company has methods for dealing with illegal calls. First you have to file a police report. Then you call Verizon Security at 1-800-518-5507 (or whatever your phone company is). They will trace the call and identify the caller. They you can make a criminal complaint in their jurisdiction unless the call is from Pakistan or something.
Source:  Business owner for 13 years.  Unfortunately you may be hard-pressed to get that money back.   You can try sending him to collections, but at that point it often starts to cost  you more than what he owes you, in my experience.   In the worst instance I lost $2100 on a single invoice that I never received a dime for.   Nearly 20 hours of my time wasted for nothing!  A bit of unsolicited advice:  I've found that when working on a service-basis, obtaining billing and payment info up front and taking a deposit makes sense.   I take 1 hour's worth of deposit and bill the rest after.   Not only does it verify the payment method works, but it also gives you a way to confirm the customer's ability to pay in the future.  If the customer balks at this, just walk away.  It's not worth the risk.   As a business, your goal is to make money in exchange for goods or services.  If your customers don't understand that and aren't willing to front a bit of money to secure your services, you'll likely going to lose time and money. "I too received a ""job offer"" from this CENEO outfit but mine was a proof reading position.Supposedly,I was to edit the email they were sending to U.S. customers. They needed proof reading alright,I've never seen such atrocious grammar and syntax.Half the time I could not figure out what these polaks were trying to convey. Anyway,I was getting a whole page to ""proof read"" daily and then, they sent me an email stating that the ""position"" had been eliminated.I never got the money I was owed." As a customer I have proof of this happening. I'm an IT manager and have major fluctuations in invoices (of over 60% price changes) that I've had to battle CenturyLink to correct the price. Is there somewhere I can share this with to help the case? Caused about 4 months worth of headaches due to CenturyLink and this would remedy that. Throwaway account was a good idea.  I work in government sourcing and depending on what government you work for, what you're doing is illegal as shit.  Federal stature and most state statute prevent a government employee from 1) getting paid for another job while being paid by the government for working during the same period (double dipping), and 2) being involved in the selection process of a vendor with whom the employee has a vested interest.  Additionally, if you work in a position that requires you to complete an ethics form and certify it, you will be further breaking the law if you don't disclose ownership by falsifying a government document.   Realistically, you're probably just full of it, but if you're telling the truth what you're doing is unethical and probably illegal.  And before you get too smug, you should know that government auditors aren't nearly as incompetent as you might think. Just overworked. It might take a year or two but I'm guessing they figure it out eventually. Government procurement and auditors generally have to verify things like company registration documents, etc...before awarding contracts and any time a contract is renewed. The auditors go back and look at those documents. It won't be hard to figure out what's going on, especially if you were the PM for the project. One company owns majority of popular freelancing websites (elance included)  Aside from the race to the bottom pricing happening for projects; customer is always right. Lots of stories of even a pip from a client freezing accounts -- not even just a project, your whole account with any ongoing projects. Everything gone. Thousands lost. Not worth it. No recourse. "I've been in a very similar situation to yours in the past.  Since the company is reimbursing you at a flat rate (I assume you don't need to provide documentation/receipts in order to be paid the per diem), it's not directly connected to the $90 in expenses that you mention.  Unless they were taking taxes out that would need to be reimbursed, the separate category for Assets:Reimbursable:Gotham City serves no real purpose, other than to categorize the expenses. Since there is no direct relationship between your expenses and the reimbursement, I would list them as completely separate transactions: Later, if you needed to locate all of the associated expenses with the Gotham trip, gnucash lets you search on memo text for ""Gotham"" and will display all of the related transactions.  This is a lot cleaner than having to determine what piece of the per diem goes to which expenses, or having to create a new Asset account every time you go on a trip." Are you being paid through a limited company or an umbrella company ? Are you self employed If not what they are doing is illegal. If you are being paid a salary, then the employer has to contribute their part of National Insurance. I believe they are treating you as self employed, hence asking you to generate invoices. Check your contract wordings properly. Or get help from Citizens Advice. Call them or visit their local office. Or else do call up HMRC.  But if you are invoicing them, I would assume you are self employed and you have to do your self assessment. Get in contact with HMRC and ask them to generate your Unique Taxpayer Reference (UTR). THey will send you the UTR and using this you can fill your tax returns.  It looks like cumbersome now, but it isn't so. You can do it yourself, I do mine. Or at the end of the financial year, get an accountant to do the returns for you, probably should charge you £100-£150. Keep all your invoices, bills, bank statements safely. This is some help from HMRC website Street name is not what you think it is in the question.  The broker is the owner in street name.  There is no external secondary owner information.   I don't know if there is available independent verification, but if the broker is in the US and they go out of business suddenly, you can make a claim to the SIPC. Generally this gets corrected when you file returns for both States -- one owes you some refund, and younowe some money to the other. Multistate tax returns are their own special kettle of worms, so you might want to consider hiring a pro to straighten this out -- their software has some tools personal packages don't. The use of an old address would make me suspect that your data was stolen from some database you had registered to long ago with the old address.  I would think that contacting your credit rating firm and the credit card company is urgent. Using a virtual credit card doesn't stop them from reporting it.  Virtual credit cards are about avoiding fraud, not about avoiding responsibility for money you owe. It's my understanding that deferred revenue will be included as income as the services are rendered. In this way, gains originating from deferred revenue are not recognized until they are actually earned.  It's a formality so the accounting adheres to the matching principle. It may help to view a DR as an advance payment (say like what an airline may do with ticket purchases that occur before the flight).   It sounds like you're wanting to penalize the business for having to eventually provide a service. But I don't know if that would be accurate, I mean, from the business's perspective, isn't it always preferable to be paid in advance? Are you concerned the company may not have any recourse should the customer try to back out or something?  I don't think I'm understanding your question, could you come at it from another angle to explain it? Westgate properties are also hotels, so you may have.    I have been reading through pages of these complaints all day.  It's amazing that people will sign these contracts without reading them first, instead believing what they are told by a high-pressure salesman.  Seems like you would do a little research before spending tens of thousands of dollars.  But that in no way excuses the tactics of Westgate.  It's amazing that they have been operating like this for so long. Could be. I haven't read the law or how its written nor am I a lawyer. Just saying there's usually a way around these things.   They could also make the business decision that the risk of lost sales is worth the potential lawsuit loss.   We're all just pontificating here ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ "The FTB, as any government agency, is understaffed and underpaid. Even if someone took a glance and it wasn't just an automated letter - consider the situation: you filed as a LLC and then amended to file as a partnership. Unless someone really pays attention - the obvious assumption would be that you had a limited partnership. Yes, you'll need to call them and work with them on fixing this. They do have all the statements you've attached. However, there's a lot of automation and very little attention to details when it comes to matching errors, so don't get surprised if no-one even looked at these statements. Next time your elected government officials talk about ""small government"" and ""cutting government expenses"" - you can remind yourself how it looks in action with this experience."