Verizon Wireless Charged me for phone I did not have and refused to refund. Then charged me after I cancelled expired contract Cape Coral, Florida

I never thought I would file a report on anyone, but I am so angry and frustrated at Verizon I want to get it off my chest.  First of all, I had two Verizon phones, one for my wife and one for me.  I had mine first, and I got a second one for my wife on Valentine's day two years ago.  Later I decided to drop mine - the contract had expired, and my daughter gave me an AT&T phone she could not afford to continue with, so I started using that.  My wife physically went to Verizon in Cape Coral and cancelled my phone.  But for months the bills seemed high.  We received the bills on line and did not fully understand them, so we went back to Verizon and were told that she just had the wrong contract - she was exceeding her max minutes.  We went back two miore times, and redid the contract minutes twice.  On the third visit we found someone else who explained that our bill was high because we were getting billed for two phones - they never cancelled the first one.  They could not refund the money, they said - they had bought out the company that our original contract was with, and could not refund money we had been charged by them (their buyout occurred after I had supposedly cancelled my phone).

Now her contract was coming to an end.  We had experienced minor service problems - voice mails were not somehow getting through, and we wanted to talk about that and about the billing problem.  We went back in and asked for the manager on duty.  The manager said he was sorry, and he could refund a small amount of money to us, up to I think about $150 - his maximum allowable.  We agreed. 

However, we talked about it later and decided we could save a lot of money with a different carrier, since we did not do any fancy stuff with the phone, and rarely went out of the area, Metro looked very good to us.  So we decided to cancel Verizon.  We cancelled Feb 12th - her contract expired on the 14th.  Then I got a letter from Veriozn thanking me for authorizing them to take payments from my bank account. Huh?  Neither my wife nor I remember ever giving them the information or authorizing any such thing - prior to that they were billing my credit card. 

We are not sure how the bank account information got to them, but it may have been because I had might have had the previous carrier (that they bought out) withdraw from bank account withdrawals some time ago.  The day after the letter thanking me for something we believe we never did, they deducted $60 from my checking account.  I called to complain, but got nowhere.  I was told it was some kind of remaining balance due, and my refunds would come soon.  I did not question how they got the account number.  I should have, but I did not. 

My wife's phone number was transfered to another carrier (Mertro) on February 14th - the day the contract expired with Verizon - cost was 1/2 of what I had been paying Verizon, and so fare after two months their service has been outstanding.  I was giving up on getting the promised refund and was about to drop it with Verizon, when I was billed again - $160 in April.  More money was deducted from my bank account! I called again, and got the same story.  Old fees - they could not tell me what or why in terms I could understand.  I was told that the refund would have been in the form of a credit, but since I cancelled my account, I would not receive it.

Folks, we were conned into a 'Friends and Family' or some such two years ago and it ended up costing us over a thousand dollars more.  Be careful - I know Verizon has a lot of good customer comments according to Consumer Reports and others, but my experience has been simply awful and in my opinion, unexcusable.