Complaint Review: Dish Network - Englewood Colorado

I am being held financially liable for leased equipment I have no legal access to, and for charges incurred for services delivered to another individual on a contract that I believed to have been cancelled years ago. There are mitigating circumstances and relevant facts that point toward several possible claims, including perhaps identity theft, unlawful seizure of property, and most certainly fraud and harassment. I believe the creditor in this case has willfully violated at least one, arguably several, articles of the Fair Debt Collection Act, and has happily assumed the role of proxy in the ongoing harassment campaign of a pathologically disordered and criminally inclined individual. Having given up much and traveled far to escape this person, I am not overly inclined to just curl up and be kicked in the teeth by a corporation he has recruited to do so.

I believed my contract with Dish Network for service at _, Placerville, CA to have been cancelled in the summer of 2004, after I called in and spoke to a customer service representative of the Dish Network corporation. I had been living as a domestic partner with one Thomas Nutting, the owner of the residence where the service was being used. I must ask you to bear with me on this, but it is relevant to note that this relationship was an abusive one. It was very subtle in the beginning, but intensified over time until it finally reached a point that I fearfully began the process of exiting the situation. I quite unwisely informed Mr. Nutting of my intent to leave, which resulted in his putting my clothing into garbage bags, throwing them in the driveway, and quite forcefully demanding that I leave immediately. As I was more than a little afraid of him, I was happy to do so. I was able to return one time to gather a scant amount of my other belongings, after which he changed the locks on the home and informed me that his council had advised him that I was to be treated as an evicted tenant. He informed me that as an evicted tenant I forfeited any and all belongings in the home to him. To discuss the psychological dynamics and dangers inherent to a woman fleeing an abusive environment is outside the scope of this letter, but if you have no familiarity with these sorts of situations you may not fully understand why I did not pursue legal action at this point. I didn't want to wind up having tea with Laci Peterson, that's why. Between my inability to access the things in "his" home without breaking and entering, the burgeoning post traumatic stress symptoms, and the simple fact that I was focused pretty singularly on physical survival, the material "stuff" didn't count for much. I just left it all everything I'd worked my entire life for was gone, but I got out.

Within a couple of weeks of my departure I called Dish Network. I told the customer service representative that I wished to remove my name and my credit card information from the account. I indicated that they may find that Mr. Nutting would like to take over the service in his own name, but that they would have to call and discuss that with him. I gave the man all the information, answered his questions, and the conversation ended with a polite, "Okay Miss Barnes, it's all taken care of". Never was I told that I needed to return equipment. When a couple weeks later I received a call from Mr. Nutting wanting to know why his satellite was't working, I suggested he get in contact with Dish Network to make payment arrangements and make sure the account had been transferred into his name. My credit card was never billed for service again, and as I knew his service had in fact been interrupted, I had no reason to believe that everything hadn't been "all taken care of", as I was told. This is the end of any knowledge I have of the Dish Network account until "equipment return boxes" were delivered to my sister's house, addressed me, with no explanation, last month. But it is not the end of the story.

Again I ask you to bear with me, but this information is relevant in the end. In September of 2004 I rented a house at -, where I remained in residence for close to the next two years. My phone number at this residence was _ my number of record until this past fall. As is often the case in these scenarios, Mr. Nutting continued to harass and stalk me mercilessly, both in person and by phone at both my residence and place of business. I never knew when he might turn up unannounced at either place. I regularly endured literally hours of a constantly ringing phone as he called over and over, leaving assorted messages on my machine as the mood struck him, or just hanging up and redialing again and again. While the frequency of his episodes diminished over the years, he continued to do this right up until I finally left the state last year. During all those years, when he wasn't engaged in trying to convince me that he really loved me, he'd really changed, and he would restore all my belongings to me if I would just "come home" (even though involved with his next victim almost immediately), he was busy conducting a full blown character assassination against me. I would stumble across a new, viciously damaging and patently untrue story about myself pretty regularly. He saddled me with tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt that he'd tricked or browbeat me into assuming, which I paid in an ill-advised but valiant attempt to protect my credit. This came as no surprise. While I was still cohabitating with him, he regularly broke into my email accounts, initiated business deals in my name, coerced me into any number of dodgy financial schemes, all in the name of crippling me presumably to make it difficult for me to escape. He very nearly succeeded, and even though I did survive it was at an obscenely high cost.

In the summer of 2006, I was asked to testify at a psychiatric evaluation of Mr. Nutting related to a custody dispute with his exwife. As I had already determined that I would move to a distant state in the coming months, I agreed to do so. Protective orders had been drawn up to be ready to file on my behalf immediately should they be deemed prudent. Before actually giving the testimony, I terminated the lease on my rented house and moved to the safety of a guest house on my sister and brother-in-law's fenced in, dog-protected property. The address of this residence was _. This was my last place of residence prior to leaving California in April of 2007. My addresses for the past 4 years can be easily documented and checked.

Please note that there was no Dish Network service, or any other satellite or cable service ever ordered for, or transferred to, any residence of mine since I cancelled the service I paid for at Thomas Nutting's residence. If service at that residence continued in spite of my request to terminate, it was continued at the request of Thomas Nutting, and should have been placed in his name at that time.

I have spent the last four years doing some very difficult work putting myself back together and am just now beginning to rebuild a life in a new state. I have asked nothing of anyone and have continued to be an honest, hardworking woman in the face of some fairly intense difficulty and gross injustice. Mr. Nutting eventually learned of my departure from the state of California, and I can and will produce affidavits from several reputable people testifying to the fact that he was attempting both overtly and thru subterfuge to gain access to information about my wherabouts, and more pointedly, my telephone number. No one, not one single person, entrusted with this information would ever, under any circumstances, reveal it without my knowledge and consent. But I can only assume that as I appear to be settling in to a secure and safe life, that people back home have in fact let their guards down enough that they might answer a question at a cocktail party or a back-to-school night about how I'm doing by saying "She moved to Georgia and is doing really well and is quite happy." All it would take would be for Mr. Nutting to find a third party who overheard it, and then to spend a little time calling information in GA until he found the right phone number. And now somehow, a collection agency was given that very number by Dish Network. I find this odd.

This is what I suspect has happened. When I called to terminate my Dish Network service, a cancellation order WAS issued. Mr. Nutting's service was interrupted and he called in and told them there had been a mistake and that service was not meant to be terminated. He then gave them his credit card information and the service was reinstated, BUT LEFT IN MY NAME. I do not know why no one mentioned the need to return equipment to me back then, perhaps it was someone's first day at work and they forgot, perhaps it isn't even Dish Networks policy to mention it and they just send the return boxes, I don't know because I have been out of the loop of this whole operation the entire time. In any event, I suppose that Mr. Nutting - knowing the whole time that the account was still in my name, and upon learning of my relocation - decided to mete out one final punishment for my having the gall to get away. He did this by doggedly seeking out my phone number and then, having finally acquired it, simply allowed the account to get in arrears to the point of disconnection, and then when the collection calls began he simply said, "Lisa doesn't live here any more, here's her new number". Why would anyone do such a thing? I'll tell you: I don't know. I only know that some do, and Tom Nutting is particularly good at it. It may be irrelevant but I feel I must mention at this point, because it may amuse you to know, that Mr. Nutting is also a reasonably wealthy man.

Upon learning of the return equipment boxes" from my brother-in-law, I asked him to get them to Mr. Nutting and to request that he (Mr. Nutting) return the equipment to Dish Network as requested. This was done, and Mr. Nutting confirmed that he was in fact in possession of the equipment, and assured my brother-in-law that he would return it. Email transcript of details enclosed.

I contacted Dish Network in an attempt to straighten all of this out, and as a result didn't sleep at all that night, and only sporadically since then, and have been dogged with the maddening heart palpitations that go with the almost-forgotten fight or flight response of years past, after being treated with absolute disdain by the utterly unhelpful supervisor of some call center in India. After finally overcoming the automated voice system that requires callers to enter either the account number or the phone number of the residence where the service is located (neither of which I had), I eventually found myself struggling to communicate with someone who had only slightly less difficulty understanding me as I did understanding him. He couldn't even get beyond the fact that I didn't know what the account number was, and I was forced to ask him to repeat everything he said 3 or 4 times, sometimes giving up altogether any hope of understanding what he was saying in his impenetrable accent. He was absolutely incapable of providing any sort of information whatsoever, but only mildly rude. Unlike his supervisor, who was eventually summoned. This man was arrogant, dismissive and flagrantly insulting. He refused to engage in any exchange with me that didn't involve me throwing myself on a funeral pyre. He denied knowledge of, or refused to disclose to me any details of the account, when and how they acquired the current address (my sister's) or phone number (mine, in another state and never disclosed by me to anyone but my closest family and friends). I finally requested that he send me an accounting of what I am being asked to pay for, and an address or phone number to which I could refer my attorney for the purpose of settling this issue with Dish Network. He hung up.

It is my belief that Dish Network knows full well where their equipment is at the service address (which is Mr. Nutting's residence, and the address associated with every payment they've received for the last 4 years, presumably). Dish Network has been happily accepting payment from Mr. Nutting for all these years. The phone number Dish Network associated with this account (before mysteriously acquiring my number AFTER the service was disconnected in January) was the home phone number of Mr. Nutting. I surmise from this that Dish Network really has no interest in having outmoded equipment returned to them, or else they would have contacted the holder of that equipment, the resident of the service address, the person who'd been paying them monthly for the service in question, the person who answered the phone when they called to arrange payment for his past due account Mr. Nutting. I think Dish Network is much more interested in playing along with the fraudulent maneuvers of Mr. Nutting in order to extort nearly a thousand dollars out of ME rather than collect equipment no longer valuable to them. I think this is not only despicable, but not in keeping with any reckoning of fair business practices or rules of legal collection processes.

Unless Dish Network has never had a single clerical error in their entire history, unless they have not had even one case of computer data loss, unless they can demonstrate that no single employee has ever made a single mistake or omission, it is ridiculous to suppose, in the face of the readily checked facts available to all here, that it is I, and not Thomas Nutting, who should be facing their collection efforts.

Laci

Decatur, Georgia

U.S.A.

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