Woman gets 500 mysterious letters in 5 days from United Healthcare

This Maine woman’s story will have you thankful for robocalls.

Stephanie Lay, a single mom from Windham, said she received 500 letters from UnitedHealthcare in a five-day span, according to local NBC station WYFF4.

“I thought I was being punked, that someone was messing with me,” she told News Center Maine of the flurry of snail mail that began on Sept. 19.

The hailstorm of letters was addressed to her son Bryce, a 19-year-old with severe autism who lives in a group home. Despite being sent to her home in Windham, the letters inside the envelopes were addressed to a P.O. box for Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services — in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The letters were serious notices for payment, but the catastrophic clerical error is altogether confusing. “It said $0 and 0 cents for a claim I’ve never made,” Lay told News Center Maine.

Lay said she’s spent hours on the phone with the health-care company and was told it was a coding issue, according to WYFF4.

In a statement to CNN, UnitedHealthcare said it could not discuss why the error happened due to privacy issues but offered up an apology for clogging up her mailbox. “We have determined the cause of the problem. We are very sorry this occurred, and we have contacted the family to discuss the situation with them,” the insurance company said.

Lay told WYFF5 the most amusing part of this mail mess is that a message on the bottom of each letter encourages patients to take their correspondence digital.

“I’m thinking they had to take down half of a forest just to send this,” she said.