3 Months After Sandy, Verizon Still Hasn’t Canceled Account Of Customer With Uninhabitable Home

Image courtesy of Roy tried to cancel Verizon after seeing this "vacation" fee, but Verizon just couldn't do it.

Roy tried to cancel Verizon after seeing this "vacation" fee, but Verizon just couldn't do it.

Roy tried to cancel Verizon after seeing this “vacation” fee, but Verizon just couldn’t do it.

In November, we told you about Roy, one of many people whose home on the coast was rendered uninhabitable by Hurricane Sandy. Roy’s displeasure with Verizon’s decision to repeatedly charge, and then re-credit, a monthly service suspension fee to storm-affected customers led him to cancel his service. Or so he thought.

Verizon has explained that this monthly $9.99 charge for suspending dial-up Internet access, which was detailed on Roy’s bill as a “vacation” fee, is credited back to the affected customer’s account the next month, so in the end the cost is zero.

But Roy still wanted his service canceled outright. He still can’t get into his home and when the day comes that he does get back in, he says he’ll find another Internet provider.

After Roy’s story appeared on Consumerist, it looked like all would be well, but he tells us that the telecom titan has failed to remove him as a customer.

“After a public shaming from The Consumerist, they admitted their error, zeroed out my account and at my request they said they would cancel it,” he writes.

But Roy says that when he went to pick up his latest batch of mail, which now gets sent to an old army base, he found that Verizon had not canceled his account and, on top of the “vacation charges,” was now hitting him with late fees.

To paraphrase Batman, “Some days you just can’t get rid of a phone company.”

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