Voip.com Charged for returned equipment and service not rendered and refused a refund Boca Raton Internet

In July of 2007 I switched my voip phone service to Voip.com because I had to. I had been a satisfied Sunrocket user for over two years when their bankruptcy debacle suddenly became my reality. I tried to make a somewhat educated decision about who I would switch to, but my options were fairly limited for getting a reliable replacement quickly (with equipment arriving in time to avoid service interruption) because of the flood of Sunrocket customers in my same predicament.

After carefully weighing my options and price plans available I chose to switch to Voip.com, mainly because I liked the design and layout of their website. They seemed to offer the right mix of features and useability for me. I had actually read about their lousy customer service, but I figured I was pretty savvy about voip phone service, and if they made options available to change on the web I really should not have much of a problem with them.

I paid for a year of service in advance. Then, a week later, I received my phone adapter and was satisfied because I was up and running quickly and apparently had no issues. My number transfer from Sunrocket was taking some time, but I later found out the time it took was pretty standard as far as number ports go.

Within just a few days of using the service, however, I began to notice that my calls were frequently being dropped and callers could not hear me on the other end at all when speaking for more than just a few minutes. I consulted their website for some information about settings I could change to fix this issue. After tinkering with the adapter settings (I changed the Qos setting - this is not found on the voip.com website, by the way) I thought things were a little better, but they did not stay good for very long.

I knew the issues were not due to bandwidth being used by my computer because A) I never had issues with Sunrocket like this and B) The computer was not using any internet bandwidth when these problems would occur. I was not really happy and not really able to use the phone service because I was always afraid I would lose a connection or the party on the other end would not be able to hear me. Because our phone number transfer was already in progress, I had no choice but to wait until it was complete and then see if the service improved (These issues all occurred on outgoing calls, though, so the connection problems I had could not really be blamed on Sunrocket) or if I was going to move service to another provider at that point.

After our number transfer was complete, the service did not improve. In fact, people who called us were even cut off when they were trying leave us a voicemail or they did not get our voicemail greeting like they should have. Of course, voip.com has a ridiculous satisfaction/cancellation guarantee (30 days AND 200 minutes of useage - which we used in a few days because we had to keep re-calling people when we were disconnected). We could not just cancel within the 30 days either because we wanted to keep our phone number and in order to do that we had to wait to cancel until our number was transferred to our new provider. After we began to switch our service and Voip.com was notified of our cancellation, they promptly charged us their $39.95 cancellation fee and sent us an e-mail noting where we should send our equipment back to them. We promptly did this following their instructions and mailed the adapter back to the address in TX they provided to us. Within a few days they immediately charged another $65 to our card we had on file with them. When we called and finally did get through to a live person, we were told this charge was for the equipment and they could not refund any portion of our original $199 fee for service because they did a number transfer for us.

When we asked them about being charged the $65 fee, even though the equipment was returned to them, they said it was because there were "scuff" marks on the adapter. Prior to this, they had said that we were supposed to ship the equipment back to their address in FL! This after I had already shipped it to TX as instructed. There were no marks noticeable on the adapter when it was shipped back to them. They are crooks and liars. So far, every attempt to get my $ refunded has been ignored. I feel they should, at a minimum, be required to refund the $65 charge and the unused prorated portion of the $199 annual service fee. I am even fine with them keeping the $39.95 even though this is technically a discretionary charge. At best I feel I am entitled to a 100% refund of all the money spent on their service since the service was terrible and I had to choice but to wait since there was no way I could keep my phone number and cancel within the terms they outline.

When trying to contact them for support you have two options 1) Send in a support ticket via e-mail (to which your response will be something cut and pasted from their website) or 2) Call them. At the time, however, I usually experienced much longer than should be expected hold times. (I was on hold for them once for nearly an hour and then was cut off once my call did go through...apparently their support people use the same crappy service they sell to consumers ha!) I will say, to be fair, that just recently I was able to get right through to someone because it was after hours and they had no authority to do anything to help me.

Avoid this company! I also used them for a short time for a business I work at, but we paid monthly and the damages were less, but we were also smart and went in and put a bogus credit card for our method of payment before cancelling so they could not put any bogus charges on our card. I wish I would have done that on my personal account with them. This was so aggravating, I just want to tell everyone to stay away, stay far far away!

I think these folks are ripe for a class action lawsuit...as I see I am not alone with the problems I am having with them. If anyone will take the case, count me in as the party to bring the suit.

Chris
Newberg, Oregon
U.S.A.