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Comment by BeetleB | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of something that happened back when I still had a landline.

They incorrectly billed us over $2000. We argued with them and they reversed the charges - twice.

So now my balance showed a credit of $2000. I kept calling them back and they said they couldn't see anything wrong on my account.

This went on for months. A number of times the person on the phone said "Well just don't tell anyone!". I asked for that in writing and then they sighed and said "I'll put a note in for someone to look at it."

I was blown away by how many friends of mine got mad at me for trying to fix it. Does anyone really think this would go unnoticed forever?

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> Does anyone really think this would go unnoticed forever?

While not of the same scale, a decade or so ago I once purchased a few hundred dollars worth of computer hardware at a store outside of my state of residence (I was visiting my parents or something). I paid for it with my debit card, and got a receipt.

I'm still waiting for that charge to go through.

I used to keep track of my expenses in more detail about 20 years ago when offline (paper slip) card payments was still used.

I noticed that there was a 25% chance of never having to pay a taxi bill as the drivers seemed to be notoriously bad at doing their paper work...

Wouldn't the optimal (not morally) move be to just set aside the money you might eventually have to pay back?

We had to set money aside because all our bills showed a credit - we weren't making thousands of dollars in phone calls every month.

What everyone was telling me to do was to make lots of expensive long distance calls because I had the credit. I didn't want to have to pay that back once they fixed it.

Except he'd have to set aside either two grand right away, or have to very carefully track his phone line usage and keep a separate account.

I think I would have closed the account, and either waited for them to realize what was going on before Accounting cut a $2k check.

A credit on an account is bits in a computer; a check going out to a customer is real money coming out of a bank account.

well, did they find out in the end? lol

I kept making sure they didn't forget about it.

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