Internet Corporation Listing Service

''This is not an invoice. This is a solicitation. You are under no obligation to make any payments on account of this offer unless you accept this offer.''

--- PLEASE PAY THIS AMOUNT --->



So begins the wording on some rather slippery documents which look like they're bills or invoices even though they're not. The wording of the disclaimer is taken directly from the US Postal Service Domestic Mail Manual; the intent is to be able to claim that this document is not a fake invoice while still retaining a format which allows a small percentage of recipients to mistake it for a bill and send payment. If the amounts requested from businesses by these "solicitations" are in the hundreds or thousands of dollars, even a fraction of a percent response rate suffices for the scheme to be profitable.

Schemes involving actual fake bills or invoices (such as one where copies of a bogus dry-cleaning bill are mailed to every restaurateur in town with a "your server spilled food on my expensive suit, pay my cleaner's bill" note) have also been used to attempt to take unsuspecting victims to the cleaners.