VERIZON PROMOTES FRAUD, STEALS CELL NUMBERS

Does Verizon Have Federal Regulators In Their Hip Pocket?

I did not expect to write about Verizon’s behavior again. This week we received a past due bill from Verizon for $418.68 for the account we closed in May. They had not removed the fraudulent charges the clerk in their Manhattan, Kansas store (1,800 miles from our billing address) had added on April 30th. After talking with their fraud department for an hour, they finally admitted to me they had never opened a fraud investigation (we filed the complaint on May 1st) and would not remove the fraudulent charges from our bill. Indeed, the woman on the phone said “it is not unusual for a Verizon customer to travel 1,800 miles to buy new devices for his/her account.” Mind boggling!!!!

I then called the Verizon store in Manhattan, Kansas and was told that, yes, on April 30th someone named Angie bought devices and they allowed her to put them on our account. They would not give me the store’s surveillance tapes without me first filing a police report. Angie? There is no one named Angie on our 28-year-old, now closed, Verizon account.

ADDING INSULT TO INJURY

Two weeks after we first called Verizon to advise them of the fraudulent charges on our account, we received our next bill: $308.05!!!!!!!!!! Our bill should have been about $142.00. It not only contained charges for five days of service for the five fraudulent lines totalling $39.79, Verizon added 5G to our cell phones which changed the monthly charge from $45 to $70 each and added various other charges two Verizon employees wouldn’t explain to us.

The last person my husband spoke with essentially blamed me, who has never been to Manhattan, Kansas, for Verizon’s failure to maintain minimal security procedures. Had they bothered to call my cell phone before allowing this fraud to be charged to our account, we would still be Verizon customers. Which brings up a final thought. Why doesn’t Verizon care about their long term customers who pay on time and never call them with problems? Doesn’t 28 years mean anything to them?

The final insult came a few minutes after the line went dead while my husband was talking to the last Verizon employee in May: a $5.83 refund. Ha! The “refund” should have been several hundred.

VERIZON IS VINDICTIVE

We naively assumed we could change our cell phone carrier from Verizon to Patriot Mobile with little hassle. Nope!!!!! Verizon made it as difficult as they possibly could. No doubt they bought and paid the federal regulators who are supposed to protect consumers from such abuses.

When our Patriot Mobile (PM) sim cards arrived we called PM to guide us through installing them into our two phones and tablet. Ninety minutes later my husband’s phone didn’t work but the tablet did. My phone was still on Verizon. Verizon had locked our phones so they could not be used on another network. (Our old phones were long since paid off, so they should have been unlocked.) Verizon claimed they unlocked our phones but PM told us they were still locked. We had no choice but to buy new phones.

Our new Samsung A14 cell phones, weighing about ten pounds each (ha!), arrived so I got online to activate them. Verizon allowed us to transfer my husband’s phone number, but not mine. Verizon had attached “port protection” to my phone number in order to punish us for cancelling our account. It took a whole week, Wednesday to Wednesday, of Patriot Mobile repeatedly calling Verizon, with us on the three-way call, to finally get Verizon to release my phone number, my only phone number, which I have owned for 28 years. My adoring fans won’t be able to reach me, I thought.

When we and the PM activation tech were on the phone (about 15 times over the course of a week) with Verizon they had a VERY elaborate and difficult means of identifying us to be sure we were who we said we were. I found this beyond hypocritical because they previously let a fraudster add five devices to our account WITHOUT BOTHERING TO VERIFY HER IDENTITY and without bothering to get our permission.

VERIZON BLOCKS CUSTOMERS FROM CHANGING TO ANOTHER CARRIER

Cell towers are owned by three companies: Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T, AKA: Big Three. The other cell services, such as Patriot Mobile, Consumer Cellular, Pure Talk and Cricket, pay the Big Three for use of their towers. When a new customer is signing up with a carrier other than the Big Three, he/she has the choice of using towers owned by the Big Three, that is: Verizon, T-Mobile or AT&T. Here is the problem: Verizon gets pissed when one of their customers changes to another service provider, AND wants to still use Verizon towers. They block that cell phone number from using their towers. So, Patriot Mobile had to first put us on T-Mobile towers for 24 hours, THEN transfer us to Verizon towers. My dad had a term for this kind of behavior: “chicken shit.”

When signing up with Patriot Mobile, we chose Verizon towers because they have strong coverage at our two homes which are 1,400 miles apart and are both “out in the country” miles & miles from a “big city.” Also, their towers provide good coverage traveling to & from. Were Verizon not so careless with security and allowed blatant fraud on our account, we would likely still be customers DESPITE THE FACT THAT THEY ARE TWICE AS EXPENSIVE, a flat $83 per month compared to upwards of $200, depending upon how much roaming we did.