So, yesterday while at work, I received an email from a debt collection agency
Apparently, I owe €486 for a subscription to "Focus Magazine" and I have not paid for the past 3 months.

Now, a couple of things:
1. I don't speak or read German. I am a foreign student. The absolute last thing I am ever going to do is subscribe to have the most random German magazine delivered to my apartment
2. According to the email, they have been trying to reach me for all of those three months by letter and I wasn't replying. I have seen no such letter, no emails either. But when I got home, I checked my mailbox and there was indeed a very yellow envelope with the exact same letter I got in PDF on the email
3. So I went and checked and on the table where we normally toss the advertising garbage that certain companies insist on shoving down everyone's mailbox, three neat and untouched copies of "Focus"
No one in the apartment can tell me when they got there, no one even noticed them. All three have my name(s) on them.

I need some advice from any of you good folk if you've ever had an experience of getting billed half your rent for a subscription you didn't make.

Extra details:
I called the customer care number for Focus magazine. It took a couple to finally get someone that speaks English: she asked for my name, she couldn't find it in their records. Then my postal address, she finally got something, but all she could do is give me yet another number and wish me luck on my further inquiries (she was super friendly actually, and eager to help) I've called that number and so far, robot response, all in Deutsch.

I have tried out the process of applying for a subscription to Focus Magazine. To see if I might have done it by accident. It is a super deliberate thing where you have to choose to be charged weekly or monthly or annually. You fill in a bunch of fields, on the Focus magazine site. It's impossible to do on accident.
There is a yearly subscription on there, for €360
And you get a (very generous) voucher of €180 to either Amazon or Otto. I've received no such thing.
But it got me more confused about how I'm getting charged for a year's subscription for 3 issues of a magazine. Each copy would be €100…

by Alternative-Stress

1 comment

  1. Honestly? If you never received a letter from the Magazine itself and only received this Mail, it sounds like scam. The best way to validate, if the Mail is legimidate, is to go over the Mail Adress with the mouse cursor. Most Scam Mails use generic generated Mail Adresses and pseudo-legimidate looking mails.

    If it’s a scam, they want to scare you to pay the money but don’t have any real possibilities to get the money from you. So you could simply wait a few days and see what happens. And if you are still not sure, either try to go to the “Verbraucherzentrale” or in the worst case get yourself a lawyer.

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