This problem began in February 2003. We had been customers of AT&T for roughly four years prior. We only had one phone and my husband carried it. He was a truck driver and often away from home. We did have no long distanc, roaming and 1000 minutes. Also unlimited night and weekend.
My husband was a coast to coast driver and used the phone to find locations for picking up and dropping off his loads. He also used it to call home. Mostly nights and weekends as they were unlimited. We averaged about 2500 minutes total, including the unlimited minutes.
Never in the entire time that we had service with them had we gone over our minutes grossly. The most resulted in an overage on our bill of maybe $100. We just always paid the bill assuming it was legitimate. After reading the complaints by other people on the website I am wondering how much they actually ripped us off before the big kahuna!
In February we received a bill stating my husband had used 4000 minutes and we owed roughly $1200.00! Since he was driving in New York state for most of the month of January, which was when the calls were supposedly made, it was genuinely impossible for him to have made that many calls.
He did not have a head set so therefore would have to hold the phone and manually dial the numbers. Some of the calls that we were billed for in one day amounted to more than twenty-four hours for the same date! How can you use more minutes than there are in a day?!
I disputed the bill and immediately called customer service. After reviewing our past usage every representative I talked to agreed that it was strange indeed for us to have such a bill.
The prior month was our normal amount and the bill following the $1200 one was also our normal amount. They did their technical things and checked the number inside the phone and matched it with the number recorded on the receiver station etc. etc. etc. The end result was that all the calls had to come from my husbands phone.
After about six weeks of arguing with them I finally decided they weren't going to do anything about it and even though I knew it was impossible for that many phone calls to be made by one person in one month I knew we would just have to pay it or have our credit ruined.
I talked to customer service representatives again and asked about setting up a payment plan and keeping our service with them. I was told that they would not accept a payment plan and if we did not pay the balance in full our service would be disconnected.
We could not and did not pay the bill and had not heard anything for 3 years and 8 months until 11-07-05 when we received the letter from Palisades Collection. Thay said that even though their client claims the bill to be legitimate they are willing to accept 50% of the amount due.
They would settle for $895.74 by 12/12/05 and would cease all collection efforts. If we don't pay it may be turned over as negative information on our credit report. I have sent a letter of dispute but have not heard from them yet.
An interesting note, we signed up with verizon right after all this started and the plan we had was a family plan with two phones. The combined minutes for these two phones was 4500 minutes. Since we did have two of them my husband and I tried an experiment. We stayed on the phone with each other as long as we could possibly manage with him driving and me working etc.
We were on the phone constantly and our two older children talked with him when I was busy. We kept checking ou minutes used to make sure we didn't go over, ha ha. With all the use our combined minutes did not excedd 3000 and AT&T had billed us for 4000 in one month with one phone!
I am going to make a report to the FCC and try to get the main coporate phone numbers as suggested by someone on the rip-off website. Please contact me if anyone can help! I will jouin anyone in a suit against these crooks!
Chris
delta, Colorado