25%?

Sanity has left the building.

Time for some serious shoe throwing!

This is the situation EECB's were made for.

Low-tier reps can't authorize a full refund, especially if it was simply a matter of a billing error. Why? Because you were billed for a service you didn't use. Never mind that you didn't know it was available, it's a matter of precedent. If everyone asked for a refund for past service they didn't need, there would be havoc.

Anyways, I'm on your side (despite how the above may sound). Good luck.

They should only refund the balance for the last month (since the initial call).Verizon did make a mistake but customer should have been paying more attention to his bill.

File a complaint with the FCC. Your complaint should be for "billing fraud". Once they get the FCC complaint you should get better service on this. If the FCC sustains the complaint (it should), you'll get someone in exec. customer service who will make sure you get resolution very quickly.

@2719: Since when has their been a statute of limitations on billing errors?

@2719:

How does failing to scrutinize your bill for a few months justify not getting a refund for those charges? I don't get this mentality. Verizon shouldn't even be making mistakes, let alone profiting from them at the customer's expense.

I feel very strongly that 25% is the max that a low level CSR can do. I would just send the EECB and you will probably get someone that can do something. They should give you what you got charged and some.

If they under bill you for amount of time should you have to pay them back?

A while back when I worked at a cable company, I went to repair a guys service and it turned out he had a filter on his line blocking out a majority of the channels. I could tell it had been installed many years ago. I checked to see when the last time someone was at his place and if he was supposed to have a filter on the line and he shouldn't have. I called a supervisor and let him know the situation to which I was told "So?" Most companies just don't care sadly.

2007?!

@2719: Damn. Blame the OP came quick today.

@2719: Is your full name "Customer Rep. #2719?" If it is, do you remember telling me I had to keep paying for my Verizon phone even after I had completed my contract and moved to somewhere Verizon had no service? Good times.

Don't stand for that kind of treatment! I was once billed by Verizon for an even $1000 instead of the $54 and change that I owed for that month.

After talking to countless CSRs and their supervisors, it took 19 business days before I got my money back. It did not happen easily though.

I dug up the telephone number for the VP of public relations in the Midwest and left her an angry but respectful voice mail message detailing what had taken place, and that I had not yet received my refund. While her outgoing message said that she would be in conferences with little access to voice mail for the next several days, I received a call back from her within 30 minutes. We spoke, and she arranged for her assistant to work with me in not only taking care of the money issue, but to also offer me a free phone and service upgrade.

I wish I could remember how I found her information, but start googling "president of public relations" along with your region, and you might come across something.

I will say that in 2006 when this happened, their internal communications methods were beyond archaic. No one in the CSR group could even place a call to someone in accounting...they claimed that they did not even have the telephone number for that group. They were only allowed to fax a request and wait for accounting to call them back on the issue. Ridiculous!

As a side note, I have done this with T-Mobile as well when they mishandled my company's business account. It gets results every time.

@2719: Is 2719 your employee ID at Verizon? Honestly. When I was a CSR at Dish Network we never would have fought something like this. Things happen. People who work 40, 50, 60 hous a week, or go to schoo, or are raising families, or whatever often do not have the time to sit down and scrutinize everything they get for bills. Sometimes you have to set a day aside to go over everything at once to make sure things are correct.

@bobcatred:

Since you agreed to it in the Tos usually

@aguacarbonica: If the few months in question happened in 2007?

They should at least be giving him a 125% refund for their mistake.

Verizon's mantra seems to be "Even if what is printed is wrong, your actual usage never lies".

2 years ago I had an issue with them where I was charged overages on IN calling (despite unlimited IN calling). In fact, not a single call received or placed in that entire month was to anyone but a Verizon customer. Verizon's response was that they agreed that the bill was wrong... but not what I owed. It was just wrong in what it printed and I still owed that money.

After about 4 months I got my refund, along with a stern warning from a higher-up CSR stating they shouldn't be doing this and its my responsibility to monitor my calls, not theirs.

@Bailen: I skimmed over that detail. I still think that a 100% refund is due in principal, but it is now more clear to me why Verizon is reluctant to fulfill that. Still, if he has proof and a good customer history, I do believe Verizon owes him back that money.

@2719: Don't take this the wrong way, but I want to punch you in the face.

I've dealt with similar issues with Verizon. I had to file a complaint with the BBB and FCC before anything happened. Once they called me, I asked why I had to call the FCC before anything happened, the person on the phone told me that nothing gets escalated until you call the BBB and/or FCC and therefore would never be resolved....

I missed a payment to my credit card, so I put it on auto pay so I wouldn't forget. Well, the computer charged me late fees over, and over again. I didn't notice it until I realized my balance never went down. So I called and they said, "You are supposed to check your balance every month, so we can only remove the last one." I said, "I don't assume my bank is stealing money from me so I don't normally worry about my statement." Needless to say I don't use them anymore and I canceled the account without paying off the balance. Yeah, my credit sucks.

I can sympathize with the OP. I was perusing our cell phone bill for 4 lines, and found one obscure charge for 9.99 "premium services". I called and found it out one of the girls had signed up for a ringtone service who bills 9.99 a month every month until you turn it off. She denied knowledge, and I believe her 'cuz the service, although billed had not been used ever.

One little line, buried in 12 pages of billing. $60.00 down the drain.

It's probably worth reading every bill every month but boy it's not easy.

@geoffhazel: I agree, they make them as hard to read as possible, probably on purpose. why would they want you fixing these "accidental" charges when they profit from them?

@geoffhazel:

Yeah I paid 6 dollars a month for 8 months... for a monthly subscription to a game. The game unlimited use only cost 9 dollars. I had no idea the 6 dollars would keep charging monthly until I canceled.

Criminality and immorality is the business model of the 21st Century.

@legwork:

So f-ing typical verizon. I cancelled my internet service with them when I moved to a new apartment. 6 months later i get a bill for over $200. I call and explain I talked to them months before and cancelled it. They say they have no record of the call, but will agree to reduce the fee to 60. Being a young, college kid with no concept of a credit score, I tell them to shove it. Never paid the bill, but now it's putting a glass ceiling on my credit score, even though I eventually paid off the collections agency reduction of 30 bucks a few months ago. I hate Verizon and their shady business practices.

@chiieddy: @Michael Ortega: Under billed? Yes, and most often will. Look at the recent Water company back billing stories.

Unfrigginbelievable...

Isn't there also a Public Service Commission where you can file complaints against misbehaving phone companies?

I'm on the fence here.

What if I found an old bill that charged me for something it shouldn't have from 2003? 1999? 1980?

What's the cutoff?

A year and a half ago is a pretty decent amount of time.

@MyPetFly: Where did all this crazy anything-goes stuff come from? I'm starting to think we should be hunting wild packs of Harvard Business School professors.

It's more Verizon Math!

@2719: Respectfully,
are you on drugs or something? Is this a troll? You can't possibly be serious.

@Murph1908: while there is part of me that agrees with the "it was a few years ago, why'd he just notice it now" crowd. All I can say is that if a company accidentally under-billed you for something any amount of time ago, months, years, decades, and they figure it out, they're probably coming after you if it's worth it to them. I see no reason the consumer, the one actually paying for services, shouldn't do the same.

@geoffhazel: Twice I've had to call our cell phone provider to dispute some texting charges. They said we had subscribed to some service (joke a day I think, and both times the same)and were charged per day until we cancelled. It was about a dollar day! I had to tell them I had never even received the texts so it was a fraud.

They claimed I had received the texts and my daughter was evidently just hiding the knowlewdge from me. No, one of them was my phone, which had been in my possession for all along and NO JOKE TEXT. They eventually relented both times, because their own records never showed either phone receiving texts from the joke place. HA, told you so. But I had to force them to look up the records before they would remove the charges. Fortunately both times the billing had started part way through a billing cycle so there were only a week or two of charges on the bill, but it was a good think I realized our bill was higher than normal and REALLY scrutinized our bill. Those charges were really hidden.

I love how sprint is belittled by the other carriers as they sucubus of problems like this. I've been with Sprint more than 6 years and never had an issue with them issuing a credit for a billing error which they have made. Making sure that error doesn't happen again may not be as easy, but they are very quick to acknowledge their mistakes.

I would file with the FCC first. And pursue everything else later.

We recently left Verizon due to billing problems. When we signed a new contract, we opted for services that would be free for 90 days. Within that 90 day window, we called Verizon and asked to drop those services. Needless to say, they didn't and we started to get billed for them. I called, they said they corrected it. I assumed all was good (I had been with Verizon for years and had never had a problem before). Well, turns out we kept getting billed for those services that we had called to opt out of for months. I figure we paid well over $100 dollars in fees for services we had dropped. Unfortunately, I didn't keep eye up the bill every month as A) I had assumed (yeah, I know, dumb of me!) that the problem had been solved, and B) I'm a little busy (dissertation, full time job, etc etc). All in all, I called them about the problem at least 6 times regarding this. A supervisor was supposed to call us twice -- they never called. It totally was fraud. I'll never ever go back to them....

Are we talking about Verizon, the wired phone company, Verizon Wireless, the cell company, or Verizon DSL, the data provider?

Complaining to one if you mean one of the others is like complaining to Comcast about a problem with your Charter cable service. They aren't related when it comes to billing issues. The article isn't specific about which, and firing off an EECB to one division isn't going to get much response if you're actually having a problem with another. I see that the EECB link in the post leads to a list that lumps Verizon landline in with Verizon DSL, and has a separate listing for Verizon wireless, but even landline and DSL together may not be correct:

I found this out first hand last year when the folks at Verizon DSL caused my landline dialtone to go away when they activated my DSL service. Nobody wanted to take responsibility for getting it fixed since they each blamed each other like they were feuding cousins. It took a call to my state's Department of Public Utilites complaining about Verizon (landline) that finally got it fixed. The person I spoke to at the DPU said they had no real power over the DSL people so I'd get more bang for the buck by filing the complaint against the landline people, and then let the pain trickle down. And that worked.

Try your states Public Utility Commission. AT&T handles my companies data services. We had repleted problems with our Houston location losing connection to the network every time it rained. Since the problem was with the last mile, we filed a complaint with the Texas PUC via an online form. Within a week, we had our account transferred to an executive customer service team who reports directly to AT&T's VP for business accounts. And the local phone company in Houston ran brand new phone and data lines all way down the street.
AT&T also credited us $15K for downtime and resolving a minor billing issue at the same time.
My boss and I were stunned at the speed and scale of the response. Because as everyone knows, dealing with AT&T at any level, business or consumer, is like a root canal. Only not as fun.
My boss and I were stunned at the

@2719:

Friends

2719 has no friends.

TMobile did this to us. They tried to tell me that I used such and such amount of internet/email while I was in Canada in a single day - something I never did. Which was later confirmed later through perhaps the 10th rep that we spoke to. Regardless, they tried to make us pay the charge and then send more bills with late fees. No way!

@2719: So you're telling me that you check every call log and do the math every month for your phone bill? (and every other bill?)

Do you measure how much water is used every month so that you can make sure you're not overcharged? How about electricity?

I'd love to see how you operate.

Does Verizon even deserve to have the opportunity to fix this with some emails and some CYA/PR behavior by an exec? I'd say contact the FCC, the presiding Department(s)of Justice as well as Weights and Measures, the BBB, and any TV consumer affairs reporter you can get to listen. In the case of companies that have a history of screwing over customers, EECBs are too nice.