Peninsular Removal Services

To cut a long story short (cue sighs of relief from both of my readers), I got a letter from a debt collection agency in the village of Port Elizabeth today.
Not at home, but at work.
And why? Because I had, back in January 2008, rung the aforementioned Peninsular Removal Services (hereinafter known as “PRS”) to give me a quote on a… er… removal job.

They never came and saw us, they did a quote over the phone (#fail) and they were hideously expensive (as far as I can remember), so we went with someone else. And that was the last we ever heard of them until today, when I got a threatening letter from some heavies in PE, ordering me to cough up the required amount of R660.81 or face the wrath of someone called Dennis.
Or some such stuff.

To be honest, at that point I had no idea I had ever dealt with anyone called PRS, so I googled them and came to this site.
And on the front page, a story which begins:

We were moving within Cape Town so phoned around for moving quotes. Some companies gave us quotes on the phone – some came out and quoted. Peninsula Removal Services did not come out – they just quoted over the phone.

Hmm – sounds familiar. As does the rest of the story – except they went after him for R52,780!

PRS are still advertising in the Yellow Pages:

…but I wouldn’t advise getting in touch, because they will secretly and belatedly charge you for the (questionable) privilege.

The website owner states:

It was at this stage that I thought I would spend 20 minutes throwing together a quick site to let other potential users of Paul’s company know what they may be letting themselves in for.

But he’s only had 201 hits in 11 months. I get that in about 11 minutes, so I thought I’d help out by publicising his (and now, my) cause a little further. So please – don’t let others fall into this trap – tell people about this post, use the retweet button to retweet it and let’s make as many people as possible aware that Peninsular Removal Services will try to rip you off.
Even if all you do is give them a call.

Consider yourselves informed.

UPDATE: I called the collection agency in PE and explained the situation. They were initially unhelpful (still wanted their cut of the money, I guess), but then when I told them about all the evidence I had amassed from teh interwebs, they quickly changed their tune and gave in.
A couple of weeks later, I received a letter confirming that I owed R0.00 in respect of this account.
Game over, Mr de Kwaadstening. You lose.