Company sends Ohio man 55,000 copies of the same letter

By Alaa Elassar, CNN

    (CNN) -- A man from Twinsburg, Ohio, was expecting to receive a letter in the mail.

Instead, when Dan Cain went to the Twinsburg Post Office to find 79 bins of mail, each containing roughly 700 copies of the same letter addressed to him, he knew something was very wrong.

"I was shocked. Are you kidding me? Who makes that kind of mistake?" Cain told CNN affiliate WOIO.

The letters were from the College Avenue Student Loan Company. The company had intended to send Cain and his wife a statement for a student loan they took out for their daughter's tuition.

Cain said the company apologized and told him there had been a glitch in the outgoing mail system, WOIO reported. CNN has reached out to the College Avenue Student Loan Company for comment.

A US Postal Service spokeswoman said the delivery of 55,000 letters was uncommon.

"The 55,000 letters that were delivered to the customer in Twinsburg, Ohio, is not something we see often, said spokeswoman Naddia Dhalai. "However, the Postal Service is committed to providing the best customer service so every piece of mail we receive will be delivered to our customers."

Compounding the mistake, the 55,000 letters had an incorrect payment amount, according to Cain. The company used the wrong interest rate to calculate the payment, he said.

The company apologized for that mistake as well and said Cain would receive a new, corrected statement, Cain said. This time, Cain hopes it will be a single letter.

"I just hope it doesn't happen again," he said. "I might have to return to sender."

Cain had to pick up the bins up from the back doors of the post office. It took him two trips to bring home the useless pile of letters, which he believes cost the company thousands of dollars to send, he said. If the company used a bulk rate discount of between 18 and 20 cents a letter, it would have cost up to $11,000 to mail the 55,000 statements.

And now, he's not entirely sure what to do with the letters, which are stacked in his garage.

"I just may start a fire, a bonfire, and burn it all," Cain said, laughing.

The-CNN-Wire
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