Comcast Auto-Payment Charges Account In Perpetuity; CSR Tells Cardholder To Cancel Card
Marian adorably paid her son's cable, phone and internet bills as he attended grad school in Chicago. All were handled by a company called... Comcast. Duh duh duuuuuuh!
She signed up for the automatic payment plan ("Nooooo!" You'd scream at her if she were a character in a movie. "Don't open that closet!") and sure enough Comcast not only over-charged her but continued to automatically charge her card even after her son closed his account, paid off what was supposed to have been the final balance and moved to California.
Her story:
Things went well until some time in February or March 2009 when, apparently, Comcast's system crashed and, according to the company reps I spoke with subsequently, all of their automatic charge information was "lost." My son and I didn't initially realize that this had happened until he got a notice saying his service was going to be cut off because of non-payment, and I received my April 2009 credit card statement indicating I had been charged $396.55 by Comcast. I then realized that my card had not been charged in March; however, the $396.55 bore no relationship to my son's actual charges, AND the money, I later learned, had not even been credited to his account! No one could tell me where the money had actually gone.
The short version: I contacted my credit card company (Bank of America) and contested the amount — they notified Comcast about the error and credited the money back to my card. My son closed out the account with Comcast because he's moving to California, and paid the remainder of his bill in cash. However, on the 29th of June and the 29th of July, there were two more automatic charges to my account from Comcast — each of them for just over $200.
What I believe has happened, and what I have repeatedly tried to suggest to Comcast, is that somehow, during their purported "crash," my credit card information became linked to some other (real or imagined) account, and that's why my card is being charged. But Comcast appears unable to fix the problem. On several occasions it was suggested by them that I "just cancel my credit card." Which would of course create a lot of effort by ME because of several other automatic payments, etc. And it's THEIR fault! (There have been no other unauthorized charges to my account other than from Comcast, and each of these charges has been an automatic deduction on the 29th of the month. Which to me indicates that this is an error involving Comcast's system.)
Comcast reps told me several times that I needed to find out from Bank of America where the payment was actually going — that Comcast was unable to track it down from their end without some kind of reference number from Bank of America. Bank of America tells me this is not the case—they get the request from Comcast and they charge my card — Bank of America states that Comcast should have some tracking device that connects the card number to an actual account. (What a concept!) In fact, Comcast is being charged a fee by Bank of America each time this happens, so one would think they might actually pay attention. Nah.
Marian says she's looking forward to seeing what happens on Aug. 29. She warns people about signing up for auto-pay. It may be convenient to streamline your bills via auto-pay but it's an absolute must that you keep an eye on your credit card statements to look out for not-so-funny business.
(Photo: honeylamb)
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Comments:
@starrion: Yeah, I learned that lesson the hard way thanks to T-Mobile about eight years ago. Now I set up automatic online payments but I do it through my bank's online banking website.
(With the exception of my student loan payment, where setting it up through the company gets me an interest rate cut. And on sums that large, the half-percent adds up quickly.)
Good luck with this, it took me 4 months to get a credit refund of 148.98 from Comcast after we paid our bill to the wrong account number.
The best thing the OP can do is call the Office of the Executive and speak with them. Do not settle for being told you need to provide an Electronic Transfer Form or whatever they call it because the bank will say what they have already told you that they do not have the info Comcast wants. Just keep hammering the Office of the Executive and eventually they will get sick of you and take care of it. As I mentioned, it took me almost 4 months to get a refund, but it sure was sweet when I cashed that check.
or file a wire fraud complaint with your state AG. That seems to get their attention really fast.
I signed up for auto-pay with Sprint Wireless. A few years later I switched to another payment method but Sprint held my credit card hostage and I got nothing but the run-around. I did cancel the card and later switched to Virgin Mobile. The day I got my VM phone I found out that VM was being bought by Sprint. Yeesh. Oh and VM's customer service is less than stellar. I'm guessing it's an industry standard.
Whatever you do, if you decide to close the Bank of America credit card, don't just open up another one with BofA with just a different number. Seems to me that BofA has a history of just transferring charges over to new credit card accounts when this sort of thing happens. Go to a different bank for the new card.
@scoosdad: Not only that, but I've seen stories on here before about getting charges to credit cards even after they were cancelled; The account magically reopened when a charge was submitted to it. Cancelling the card is not a reasonable option - this is shifting the work off to the affected party and not to the actual source of the problem.
@rwakelan: i use BofA's Shopsafe Virtual CC card for my Comcast and AT&T bill... set a limit to $80 per month for 6 months, feed the cc numbers to comcast and att, comcast auto deducts, while i set att to deduct when i tell them to...
though for my electric bill, i had to give them access to my checking account, as they want 3% more for cc, and i don't want to pay for checks
Don't chargebacks cost the charging company some huge amount of money? Could she just issue one every time they charge her?
never used/trusted "auto-pay" anything. it convenient enough for me to just sit down once a month and pay online with credit or online checks while I go over my finances and statements. Just getting rid of the hassle of writing & mailing checks makes me happy enough. Its to the point now where I hate even dealing with cash (but I do keep some aside for emergencies like electronic blackouts.)
Always use the bill payment function from your bank.
NEVER auto-pay anything.
Have been burned before.