US Yellow "This is not a bill" - but you're actually ordering a quarter's worth of advertising Jacksonville Florida

We received an invoice for advertising space 1 of our locations for 2012 and 2013. This was unexpected as our company is not advertising across any channels.

Looking at paperwork from last year, we received a form from this company that stated the biggest and boldest heading on the paper: "This is not a bill". We updated our information on this listing form - and yes, it is called a "Listing Order Form", but it does not say, "I would like to advertise". Instead, it is interpreted as I am simply updating our company's listing. There are 2 boxes for a priority listing and a bold listing, both with a cost attached and we of course did not check either box.

There is small print that says you will receive a complimentary internet listing to be included with every yellow pages listing. And the listing fee for the print and/or CD listing is $229 per quarter. However, we did not in any way indicate that we wanted this print and/or CD listing; we presumed based on this that we were getting a listing with the internet and not an extra-cost listing. That is exactly how it was read and interpreted, so we updated our information so that whatever directory that had our listing would be correct. This just so happened to be at a time last year when we were dealing with several of our locations showing up online with incorrect numbers, so we wanted to make sure we had updated numbers for our 2 locations that they sent this form to us about.

Now over a year later, we receive an invoice that shows "Past Due"! For what? For advertising for both last year AND this year, that we never even saw or signed up for. For those who have not worked with advertisers, you normally receive a proof or even a sample of the real deal advertisement at some point; we did not even get that, which even more speaks to what a ripoff this whole charade is. So I call customer service, to which point the girl on the phone says "well, yess I see where that can be confusing since it said 'this is not a bill', but right above there it says 'listing order form'." Thanks, but this is not setup like any type of order form I've seen - the cost is hidden and written in such an ambiguous way that there's room for interpretation, obviously, so to say that it says 'order form' does not mandate that we wanted any advertising whatsoever from your shady company.

I have reached out to see if they will cancel this invoice altogether, and we'll see if I get any response. This is a complete sham of a company and a most underhanded way to do business. You can believe that we will never advertise with an organization like this in the future, either.