Verizon Wireless Verizon Wireless begins parasitic billing practices 2008 Phoenix Arizona

I have been a customer of Verizon Wireless for eight years and found them a welcome change to the arbitrary and capricious billing practices of Spring whom I abandoned for this reason in 2000. I am sorry to report that after eight years Verizon is resorting to the same kind of underhanded billing activity that made me despise Sprint. My monthly bill without overages is projected to be $70 a month, but I started receiving bills for approximately $200 approximately 6 months ago. I kept reducing my plan and conserving usage in an attempt to avert additional charges as a reduction in pay while changing jobs forced conservation in many areas of my life practices. However, I soon found that what appeared to be a courtesy of changing plans was in fact costing me approximately $20.00 each time. I didn't find this out till much later and after many supposed courtesy plan changes. In fact, Verizon encourages you to change your monthly plan if your usage changes in order to avoid overages or in my case because I wasn't using all of the minutes. Little did I realize I was encountering surcharges every time this occurred. Here is another interesting note. If you live close to a border and there is an opportunity for Verizon's phone to use a foreign tower and charge you significantly more to just answer a call, it will. While your phone will not dial out in a foreign county without a plan for that county, it will take calls, not that you have to actually be in that country. You can be close to the border and your phone will ring, you answer it and talk to your friend and suddenly you get an extra $70.00 worth of charges on your bill. I had to specify that I did not want my phone to ring while roaming close to a foreign countries tower in order to avoid future charges of this kind. As for the current charges, I was still liable according to Verizon.

Here's another one they like to screw their customers with. Let's say I accidently press a hot button on my phone for mobile web and I don't have a plan for mobile web. They charge me $2.50 for that 1 second of activity before I could quickly push the end button repeatedly. I found 4 charges in one month like this. Again I had to tell Verizon not allow my phone to make these connections, as for the charges already incurred, they insisted I pay them.

Text messaging is another huge scam. Again, if you're not on a plan, watch out. I had all text messaging blocked, but not before incurring $100's of dollars in charges over several months from people I did not want to talk to or hear from sending me harassing text messages. Meanwhile, I have communicated extensively in writing and over the phone with Verizon's increasingly more incompetent customer service department. They make promises and never follow through, tell you one lie and then another trying to get you to accept convoluted phone bills with bunk charges on them as the outfall of their twisted operating practices. These people are professionally trained to be rip-off artists, trained to justify bogus charges, trained to reframe the charge in another context when you define the problem and establish that it is illegitimate. They arbitrarily assign you two year contracts when you only request one, look for ways to legitimize a warranty problem with your phone when you come in for replacement, agree to give you a new phone, but again arbitrarily renew your contract. I have repeatedly had to notify customer service of poor practices in Verizon stores and had management at headquarters contacting management at stores to handle the problem in an equitable and fare way and prevailed.

However, of late, it would seem that Verizon's ethics and effort to be equitable and fair have given way to greed ridden schemes that victimize the unwary consumer out of hard earned dollars. They have descended into the vile circle of filth, which comprises many communication companies operating practices. The worst I've seen are Qwest and Sprint, but Verizon has slowly turned up dial and I am sorry to report, now totally stink. The last and final blow came this 9th month of 2008 when I received the $321 phone bill. I called and wrote to establish what ludicrous circumstances could have yielded such a high amount with no overages and a monthly bill that should have been $70. They suggested that I was being billed an extra month in advance due to the fact that last month they had mistakenly turned off my service. I told Verizon that was their mistake and that they acknowledged this mistake in writing via email and also during a phone conversation, thus resulting in reversal of the reconnect fees. Never-the-less they insisted that I had now qualified for a free chance to be billed a month in advance and would be held accountable for those charges. Meanwhile, I was able to successfully argue away charges for a suspended broadband service, due to the fact that my laptop had been stolen from my car the month previous. I had called and made arrangements to suspend that service until I had acquired another laptop. At the time there was no conditional suspension and the threat of an arbitrary invocation of that service without my knowledge or permission. However, that is exactly what they did. When the customer service representative finally agreed to reverse the charge, she did not reverse the arbitrary $135.14 I was charged for $60.00 worth of unused broadband service, but only the $60 I was supposed to pay had I agreed to reactivate the line when the new laptop arrives. So, it would seem Verizon only likes to reimburse the amount they are supposed to bill and keep the overages they are perpetually giving themselves at the customer's loss. Complete taxation without representation. Artificial billing practices; these people are a public utility held accountable for rate changes by Public Utility Commissions, like any other public utility. Why do I see this behavior repeated by communication company after communication company for at least the last 18 years? Why isn't the regulatory community doing something to protect consumers from this parasitic behavior? These are the questions that inspired this essay, which I will submit to the Arizona Corporation Commission, the State Attorney General's Office and the Better Business Bureau. I think these issues should be addressed and investigated and corrective measures implemented to prevent these types of fraudulent billing practices by communications companies.

Fraudfighter
Phoenix, Arizona
U.S.A.

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