A response from Allstate re last week’s blog.

Let me recap. Last week, I received a letter from Allstate Financial Services, thanking me for signing up with them for my financial portfolio and insurance needs.

Only thing is … I hadn’t signed up with Allstate. I had a life insurance policy that I canceled in 2010, I also had an auto policy that I canceled in 2018, and a renter’s policy that I allowed to end in 2019. I moved to another insurance company for my needs.

So it was a big surprise to receive this letter, thanking me for signing up with them.

Again … I didn’t sign up with them.

I received the letter on Tuesday. That evening, I called my local former Allstate representative, and asked them why I received this letter.

They said they didn’t know anything about it.

Sure they didn’t. Right.

They asked me to send them a copy of the letter. I did. Never heard back from them.

So I blogged about this experience. The link to that post is here.

As part of my blog promotion, any time I have a new blog post, it automatically posts to my social media accounts. And apparently once that thing posted on my Twitter account, Allstate’s Twitter feed quickly reached out to me.

This is proof that if you want anything done with a corporation, you have to basically call them out on social media. Geez, if I had known that years ago, I could have shamed OnwardMobility into getting me a new 5G BlackBerry pre-release test model cell phone. 😀

So anyway …

On Thursday, I received a direct phone call from Allstate’s headquarters in Nebraska. They asked for a copy of this letter. I mentioned that I had sent it to my local Allstate representative, but I could certainly forward it to them as well. They said they had not been notified by the local Allstate representative, so they would be happy if I sent them the letter.

Wow. Good hands people. Left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

Later that Thursday, another Allstate representative contacted me.

And now we find out what happened.

Earlier, I mentioned that I had closed my Allstate life insurance account in 2010. In doing so, I told Allstate to cash in my life insurance and close the account. They told me they had done so.

What they didn’t tell me is that the underwriter for my insurance policy – which was not Allstate, but another company, either Jefferson-Pilot or Lincoln Financial or C. Montgomery Burns Fiduciary, I don’t know – didn’t tell Allstate that the account was closed.

And since Allstate claimed to not know that the account was closed, they were required to send me a letter of reminder at 36-month intervals.

But Allstate didn’t send the letter at 36-month intervals. They sent that letter TWELVE YEARS after I closed the life insurance account.

Yep. Left hand, right hand.

The person at Allstate promised me that they had scrubbed my name and information from the account, and that I shouldn’t receive any more zombie letters like that. I took her at her word, and told her that I was very upset at seeing these phantom letters coming back, claiming I had signed up when I hadn’t. And as a victim of identity theft and of computer hacking, I’m extremely sensitive to anything appearing out of the ordinary, whether it be advertising letters or unsolicited text messages or the like. This kind of shit can freak a man out, don’tcha know.

Again, Allstate apologized, and promised that the zombie letters will stop.

So what did I learn from all this?

1. Allstate reads my blog. Or at least the social media reposts of my blog.
2. Big corporations can operate with mistakes until someone calls them out.
3. Apparently the only way to move mountains these days is to blog about something, and then repost it on social media.

And with that in mind, I’m considering this matter with Allstate closed. Done. Finito. Over like a fat rat.

I did my part. Now let’s see if Allstate does theirs. Trust me. I don’t want any zombie mails from them. Shit, I don’t even want Dean Winters showing up on my front door. Or Dennis Haysbert. None of them. At this point, I’d rather see a gecko, an ostrich, a caveman, a CGI-generated military commander, or a white-frocked hairbowed insurance fangirl.

So let’s just keep all that in mind.

We good, Allstate?

We good.

For the moment.