You're playing dumb and I don't appreciate it.

[Food Lady]

OK, so clients can have multiple contracts with us if they have our stuff in different offices. This one does.
I send the past due information to "Bob". He emails back saying, no, they closed that contract last year. He gives me a ticket number; great. I look it up. I respond that the termination was for a different contract/account number in their company. The one assigned to me is open and billing and very past due. He sends a terse email with the contract/account details, I'm guessing the one he thinks is closed. I respond that yes, that is correct for Contract X (he'd recognize the number as the one I provided before as being past due and assigned to me) and that it is 380+ days overdue. He responds "What is 380+ days overdue?" Um, THE CONTRACT YOU JUST MENTIONED?
I am done arguing over email. If I haven't sent demand letters I am sending them and then making my quote for termination and placement with outside collections. I'm coding the account "refusal to pay". It's been over a year and our head of collections would say "These people have wasted enough of my time." At the point of over a year, that's true.

[EricKei]

I've found that people who "play dumb" often aren't playing.

[Kristev]

Agreed. Stupidity is everywhere, in many ways.

[Seanette]

I've found that people who "play dumb" often aren't playing.

Pretty much exactly my thought about the subject line. "How sure are you they're PLAYING dumb?"

[Food Lady]

I believe at this point he's now arguing with the outside collection agency. He may be dumb, but they have all the receipts. We gave them to them.

[taxguykarl]

Is that SC really playing?
At 2:10:

[evilhomer]

Oh, I'll play dumb and hope you'll get so frustrated that you'll just let me away with my scam. If that doesn't work, he'll go with the classic "taking my business elsewhere". Yeah assclown, if you're not paying your bills, that's not exactly a bad thing.

[Food Lady]

We'll force him to take it elsewhere. I generally try to avoid placing but sometimes it makes me happy.

[XCashier]

I've found that people who "play dumb" often aren't playing.

It's usually more like Obfuscating Stupidity. They keep playing dumb in the hopes that you'll get frustrated and give up, letting them have their way. Giving him to an outside collection agency is the smart thing to do; they'll kibosh that nonsense PDQ.

[Food Lady]

Yep, the only reason my team is collecting at all on these really old ones is so we can say "We called X phone numbers, sent letters to all the Accounts Payable contacts that the client provided, attempted to settle the contract, etc." If we have all our ducks in a row and that's documented, we can send them to collections knowing we've covered our butt in case they sue us. Before my team existed the off-shore collectors did it all and it wasn't organized. They also don't seem to have the same negotiating skills we do, either because of a lack of training or because they weren't hand-picked to do collections because of said skills. We were. We just do a bit better on the overall process. The accounts that drag out for a year are problematic and I guess those companies are the ones that tend to want to take us to court. My goal is to get it off the books either by payment or placement. While payment is better, Finance will take the loss on a placed account. It just looks bad for us to have such old debt. My job is hard but I actually like what we do. I feel we're valuable.