Today’s blog is shifting gears a little bit. I always make it a habit to check my phone bills because I have found charges that appear that really should not be there. I would say once or twice a year something shows up that just does not make sense. Usually it is not a big number, but when you multiply these errors over the millions of bills that go out monthly and it can be a big bonanza for the phone company.
Today I really had to look at my cell phone bill. My wife had gone out of the country and she was setting up for her reimbursement for her travel expense. The only problem was that her expense did not cover the added cost of the bill. We found that there was almost $20.00 of charges on my oldest son’s bills that he had no idea about. I went on line and checked it out and then called Verizon. I was told that it was a sneaky thing, but there are companies that sent a text that once Josh opened it up he automatically opted in to a $9.99 monthly charge. ONLY BY OPENING UP THE TEXT. The nice operator from Verizon then told us how to opt out (which we did immediately) and then she put blocks on all our phone lines to stop this from ever happening again. Sounds ok right?
Here is where it got a little dicey. I asked her if the charges would be reversed and she said she could not do it, even though it was unsolicited her hands were tied. I informed her that as a consumer I found this hard to believe, and I asked if there was a number I could call these two companies on to get it fixed. The only numbers she had were the 5 digit numbers to text to opt out that we had already accessed. I found this hard to believe as the phone company actually does the billing for these companies as a pass through so there has to be a way to get better info on it so I asked to speak to a supervisor. The kind lady put me on hold, 5 minutes later she came back telling me she had the authority now to reverse the charges. She apologized again for her hands being previously tied.
This is what I took out of the entire experience. The phone companies actually support this agenda because they act as the billing source for these scam companies. Why aren’t the phone companies protecting their end users. There must be so much money in it that they don’t worry about making customers like me ask to speak to supervisors to get the charges reversed. I guess some people would just take it and even if they get only 20% of the billing, there is a lot of money, particularly if you don’t check your bill monthly.
Check your bills and if you don’t have these blocks set up do it right away.