Nextel ripoff fraudulent billing, non-disclosure of billing practices prior to signing contract Did not authorize any pre-payment of usage. Houston Texas

After having major billing problems about 4 years ago, I swore we would never use Nextel service again.

Prior to starting our current service, I asked at least 3 different people with Nextel if they had resolved all of their billing problems and they all said yes. Obviously, that is not true!

We never received our bill from Nextel, and after finally getting their online service to work, I printed my two bills. The first bill was to be pro-rated for 22 days and the second was for a full month of service.

Well, low and behold, I received in the mail a termination notice stating that we owed them over $1100.00!

We should have owed them a total of $600.19 not including taxes.

Nextel billed us for 2 months up front and then our normal billing cycle; however, the amounts billed were not correct. They also billed some sort of set-up fee and rebilled a set-up fee when we upgraded one of our phones 4 days past the second billing cycle end date.

They are now saying that Netel pre-bills one month in advance of service. Okay, this is a cellular company. How can you bill one month in advance of actual usage? What if we go over our allotted minute usage?

I have never heard of a cellular company billing one month prior to usage. This is absurd! Our other cellular company, T-Mobile doesn't do this, nor did Verizon when we had their service.

I spoke to a Nextel billing person (no name given!) for 45 minutes regarding this and also said that we had not approved paying an additional month of service up front! The Nextel employee said "hold on" and transferred me to some other person not even in billing! She pulled up our account, guess what?

No mention was ever made that I had called Nextel today and spoke with someone for 45 minutes! They only showed when I had called on October 1st! Then, the poor girl (who was actually very nice) spoke with me and gave me another number to call.

We saw your website online and got the main office number off of it and called them. Huge waste of time. We are now at 1 1/2 hours of talking to Nextel people.

As you can gather by my writing of this incident, nothing was resolved and I was told to try back on Monday!

By the time I had hung up the phone from Nextel, I had been on the phone with a Nextel person (or persons as the case may be) for over 2 hours. Nothing was resolved!

I will call again on Monday, October 6th and hopefully be able to speak to someone about this.

If you are considering becoming a Nextel "subscriber" I hope that you are show the back of the "Subscriber Agreement", given a magnifying glass and shown where #10 Rates, Charges and Payment is written. We were never made aware of any writing on the back of this form and did not authorize any pre-payment of usage.

It's amazing how the back of that page is almost not legible (even with a magnifying glass) and that the back of the "Nextel Customer Expectations Review" is printed in the same dark font as the front page.

Also it is not anywhere on that "expectations" that Nextel will pre charge usage one month in advance.

Please let me know your thoughts and any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Yvonne
Stafford, Texas
U.S.A.