Pay Attention to Your Phone Bills

Especially if you’re serviced by AT&TSCAM.

That’s right. Everytime I use their name, I’m going to add SCAM to it so that they become associated as scammers that they are.

If you use a phone card to place an international call, there’s a chance they will deduct minutes for the phone card call AND CHARGE YOU INTERNATIONAL RATES FOR THE INTERNATIONAL CALL.

This month, they charged me $53 for a 15 minute call to Korea. Then, I saw that last month’s bill was pretty high, too, but I hadn’t paid attention letting the automatic payments take care of it. Last month, they had been applying those same charges.

Prior to these last two months, during the 1year+ that I had been with Cingular, I had never been charged for international calls. This makes sense because I can’t make international calls. These calls are connected by the phone card company. They are the ones who get to charge me, not AT&TSCAM.

The call center reps are trained to believe that policies never change and that they’re always legit. Luckily, my first call was connected to a guy who made the effort to compare current and past bills and listen to my argument, even though it took a while to get me to convince him that it’s pretty dumb to charge me to use a phone card AND charge me for a call made through that phone card. I also made him read the bills with me, pointing out that all the same calls made prior to the last two billing periods had never been charged. He finally agreed that these current charges were weird and eventually, he said he’d reimburse me for this month’s charges.

I asked that last month’s charges be deducted as well and that, if the policies had changed and they are now required to charge for these international calls made by phone card, then have one of his supervisors e-mail me documentation of those policies and how and when they were placed so that I could legally challenge them if necessary. Then he put me on hold and then came back to tell me he’d credit me back for all those faulty charges. He told me that his supervisor had also tried to convince him that these charges were legitimate. How unexpected . He also promised to put “notes” on my account so that, if these charges were applied again in the future -and they might, I won’t have to go through the whole ordeal of arguing to get those charges removed.

So, I might stay with Cingular for a while, who knows, only because I don’t want to go through another hassle of a phone number change. I thought about switching to SprintRUDE but I hear they have the worst customer service ever. I should remind my (two or three) readers here that you guys CAN get out of your contract with AT&TSCAM if they’ve made any changes to their policies, because these were not the policies you had agreed to when you signed into a contract with them.

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts