Pisa ticket received 6 years later

Are you sure the post office forwarded to your new address also registered letters?

If you actually never got a registered letter from Italy, your cousins are right. If the collection agency can show evidence of a registered letter mailed to the right address within 17 months from your travel, you may have a problem. Even if, I doubt they can force you to pay, but they may have a point.

I'd ignore them, but you can ask this agency to prove you received the fine when and how Italian law states . Six years ago, Were you given the opportunity to either file an appeal or pay with a 30% discount?
You can't pay on Pisa's site because the City sold your debt and deleted your file. The collection agency must have bought a bunch of unpaid fines without checking if they were enforceable.

This doesn't mean you did not break the law, you must have entered a ZTL. Next time learn about local rules and memorize international signs before getting behind the wheel.

Thanks so much. Yes I'm positive I never received anything, and my mail was being forwarded to me. I also moved 4 years later and at the time, my husband even worked for the post office in the town we lived in.

I will now ask for PROOF that they sent me something originally. But I was afraid that the collection agency would attach my credit with this.

So unless they can prove they mailed it to me, I will not worry. thanks.

Oh no they never offered a discount, in fact the ticket they claim was 175e but they wanted over $500 in fines and late fees. Then they said ok if I pay 230e they would mark it as paid. I said NO. then I tried to go on the web to pay but was not able. They never offered an appeal either.

they call me hourly from all different numbers, unfortunately when I got their letter i called to see what this was about, and they have my phone number. so now the calls and texts almost hourly.

Why don’t you block their phone number?

Wow, where is this person? That type of harassment by a collection agency is not allowed here.

If you are in the US, you may want to contact your state's Atty-General office to determine of hourly calls are permitted.

If the collection agency is not US based, you may just have to wait out their blitz of calls until they give up.

From a previous post:

Traffic fines incurred by foreign drivers that are uncollected are sometimes (not all Italian municipalities do) “assigned” to a third party collection agency with international affiliates. Those agencies try to collect those fines for a commission fee that can be as high as 50%.

The good news for you, who live in the US, is that those foreign traffic debts are not enforceable in US Courts, and since 2015, debts arising from traffic fines (among others) are no longer reportable to the Credit Bureaus, therefore the collection agency will be unable to obtain a judgement against you in Court and won’t be able to report you to the Credit Bureaus either, so your credit score will not be affected.

https://www.discover.com/credit-cards/resources/do-parking-tickets-affect-credit-scores/

They will however pester you to convince you to pay anyhow. It is therefore very important that you know your rights as set forth by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). They cannot harass you, and threatening to report your debt to the Credit Bureaus knowing that they can’t is a serious violation of such Act. Violations of the FCRA by the Collection Agency would entitle you to collect damages which could be actual damages or statutory damages ranging from $100 to $1000 (no need to prove you actually suffered damages to get that). So you could even be making some money from this incident.

I have not worked for collection agencies, but I audited them on behalf of Hospital systems who engaged those agencies to collect hospital debts from patients, so I had to become acquainted with their practices and the provisions of FCRA.
(https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/italy/traffic-violation-new-scam)

I have blocked the phone numbers they call from, but keep using different numbers. Now that I know I do not need to pay I’m just ignoring them. But it’s tough!!

but the quoted item just above is only if you are in the US. It has no bearing anywhere else.

at least here in the US there's a terrible business called zombie debt. Unscrupulous collection agencies buy up lists of old uncollected debts and start hounding people. They don't care if by law these debts are dead, they count on scaring people into paying at least something. And apparently if you do pay even a little towards a debt, it wakes it up again and the clock restarts. I got such a call a few years ago, I just insisted on proof that the debt was real and still good, and they disappeared. Proof proof proof.

and yes, there are state and federal laws regulating collection agencies. But it doesn't mean they have to follow them and apparently the risks are low.

Thank you all if they ever get through I will require proof of the mailing in 2014 to me of the ticket. Etc