Verizon's Robots Won't Stop Trying To Get Me To Pay For Bulk Text Messaging

(Dan Coulter)

Matt isn’t big on text messaging, which is why he says Verizon has assaulted him with robocalls to get him to get in on the labor-intensive, thumb-cramping, erratic driver-inspiring phenomenon.

He hasn’t been able to throw the Cylon salesmen off his tail. He writes:

My wife and I signed up for Verizon cell service last week and have been pretty happy so far. Starting Monday, my wife noticed that we were getting a nightly call from 888-453-1960 with a caller ID of “TOLL FREE CALL”. The robocaller was leaving us empty 5 second voicemails, with no identification. Using http://whocalled.us, I found out it was probably Verizon and called them. I asked why they called and after verifying my info, they told me it was “regarding an overage on my account”. The overage? 1 text message, at a cost of $0.20. I explained that I didn’t have a text plan on purpose ($5/mo * 2 phones) and that since I only get about 5 texts a month, I didn’t need one. I asked them to stop calling me, but the rep stated that the calls were “computer generated” and that I could not opt out of finding out about my twenty cent overage. I would like to know if my wife’s limited data plan started going seriously over, but 1 text message? Are they going to call me every time I get one?

The evil corporate genius side of me thinks that the main purpose of this harassment seems to be to convince me to get a text message plan, the consumer side figures that someone complained about not being warned when their daughter sent 23,000 messages in a month. Regardless I’d like to either opt-out completely or set some kind of threshold, neither of which seems to be an option.

If you know how to stop the Verizonbots — perhaps a well-targeted EMP? — let us know.