(RALEIGH) -- State Attorney General Roy Cooper said Corporate Services, Inc. sent questionable letters to hundreds of North Carolina businesses in violation of an earlier agreement. On Thursday Cooper and Secretary of State Elaine Marshall announced that, moving forward, the company would not be allowed to do business in North Carolina.

“Trying to trick small business owners and violating legal agreements aren’t the way to do business in North Carolina,” said Cooper.

In 2009, Cooper and Marshall filed suit against Corporate Services, Inc. and owner Selwyn J. Monarch for misleading North Carolina businesses into thinking they had failed to comply with state laws on taking and filing corporate minutes. The letters gave the appearance of coming from a government agency and directed businesses to pay $125 and provide information on their corporate minutes by a certain date.  The state won a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against the defendants.

In March, 2011, Corporate Services entered into a settlement with Cooper and Marshall that barred it from sending misleading mailings and paid $25,000 to the state.  But Corporate Services later sent another mailing out to hundreds of businesses across North Carolina. This violated the settlement agreement, according to Cooper and Marshall.

“This is a case where we gave a company the chance to stop misleading North Carolina employers and businesses, and they blew it,” said Marshall. “The bottom line is that we are not going to allow anyone to send out advertising that tries to pass itself off as official government correspondence when it is not.”

The company has been ordered to stop doing business in North Carolina, return checks to 700 businesses in the Tar Heel State and pay $30,000 to the state of North Carolina.