Back in 2000, I worked at a magazine published by Time Inc., a division of Time Warner. When Time Warner merged with AOL, all employees got a petite perk: a free AOL email account. I gave mine to my wife, who used it until last year, when she finally upgraded to Gmail and I left Time Inc. to join The Wall Street Journal.

About a month ago, we started getting bizarre phone calls from a collections agency in India. They called five times, “concerning unpaid charges of $103.60.”

When I asked what I was being charged for, I was told it was four months’ worth of something called “upgraded service” for AOL in late 2008.

When did Franz Kafka take charge of AOL's customer-service department?

I pointed out that we had never requested or agreed to any upgrade, nor used any AOL service other than email.