To save money, Justin got his dad to switch from Verizon to Vonage and port his business number over. Three weeks later, after running back and forth between the two companies, calling the number results in a “sorry, your call did not go through” message. Needless to say, this had quite an adverse effect on Pops’ business.

Angered, Justin wants to sue Verizon for damages, as they broke FCC regs in not porting the number in a timely fashion. However, he doesn’t know where to find one.

We direct Justin to FindLegalHelp.org. By selecting your state and scrolling down to your county, you can find the number for your local bar association. They should be able to put you in touch with a lawyer experienced in similar issues.

Also, if anyone knows of a lawyer competent in this area, they can leave the info in the comments or contact Justin directly at helpmewithlnp@gmail.com.

Justin’s source complaint, inside.

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“I was looking at my dad’s phone bills and noticed he was paying close to $30/mth for Verizon local service and Sprint long distance service. $30 for somthing he rarely uses. So we went out and bought a Vonage box at OfficeMax. Brought it home, I activated it on 8/7/06.

We were given a temporary number to test the sound quality and everything worked fine. So I called up 3PV, the company that initiates the number transfer. They asked me a battery of questions, including Verizon account number Social Security etc. They also asked me if i had DSL service associated with the number i was porting. I told the agent that we had Verizon FiOS, and not DSL. So put down a no in the transfer request.

I was told the transfer would take 7-20 days to complete

14 days later I get an email from Vonage saying your number will be ported at the end of the day. Then the next day I get another email saying the port has been completed. So I plug in my Vonage box, hook up the phone and everything is working

About a week later I plug in the phone back into the landline and i get a dialtone. I call up Vonage, they told me to call Verizon and tell them to disconnect the service even though they explicitly told me not to when i spoke to 3PV.

What follows is two and a half weeks of back and forth bullshit between Verizon and Vonage trying to get my landline cut off and my account removed from the Verizon system.

Then, finally my landline is disconnected. About three days later, my dad tells me that people cant call him for some reason. I picked up one of our verizon landline phones, tried to call the ported number and got a “sorry, your call did not go thru” message.

So I call up verizon and after on hold for an hour i am told that… *drumroll*… the number transfer is still pending!

So here I am, about three weeks without a working phone and a ton of my dad’s buisness lost. Verizon put a ticket in and said it would be taken care of in 24 hours 3 more weeks after the fact, that ticket still has not been worked on. It seems that the order slipped through the cracks, and nobody at Verizon has the power to fix the problem.

So I go a step higher, Verizon Customer Relations in Pennsylvania. One would think that customer relations would be able to fix a problem like this. Not the case.

My contact at Customer Relations worked on the case for another two weeks, got nowhere. I reported it to the Utility Commission, and all they did was send it to a higher level CSR at Customer Relations.

Verizon is breaking FCC regulations by not porting a number in a timely fashon.

I wanted to formally sue Verizon for damages, but I cant seem to find a lawyer that handles those sort of things.”

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