Sue has a serious problem with Comcast. They’re billing her for $1236.02 in porn she never ordered, claiming that it must be her 15 year old son who is ordering it.

She finds this unlikely for several reasons:

1) The cable box that is supposedly being used to order the porn is sitting, unplugged, under a chair in her bedroom.

2) Her son wasn’t at home when many of the movies were ordered.

3) The movies were ordered one after another, literally, minutes apart.

4) Her son is not a jerk who would order $1236.02 worth of porn over the course of several months then laugh as the bills keep rolling in.

5) The cable boxes have parental controls installed, yet are malfunctioning and acting crazy, and a tech has been out to the house to confirm this.

Sue summarizes her bill thusly:

3/16 4:27 PM – PORN

3/16 4:33 PM – PORN

3/16 5:45 PM – PORN

3/18 9:41 PM – PORN

3/18 10:33 PM – PORN

3/18 10:41 PM – PORN

3/20 9:41 PM – PORN

3/20 9:43 PM -PORN

3/20 10:32 PM -PORN

That’s a lot of porn. Sue has been locked in an epic struggle to get Comcast to
a) Fix her cable boxes so they stop ordering porn.
b) Take the bogus porn charges off her bill.

Comcast refuses, claiming that they will credit her for only half of the now $1236.02 bill.

Sue’s calculated what her normal bill would be, plus the couple movies she actually did order on OnDemand and sent that amount to Comcast, along with a letter that she’s allowed us to reprint here. She’s currently thinking of switching back to satellite, but is concerned that all of this porn is going to ruin her credit. We don’t blame her. $1236.02 is a hell of a lot of porn.

Here’s Sue’s letter to Comcast:

To: brian_roberts@comcast.com
Sent: Saturday, May 19, 2007 9:49 PM
Subject: HORRENDOUS EXPERIENCE WITH COMCAST

Mr. Roberts,

I became a Comcast customer in June of 2006. My first 1 to 2 months was what I considered an absolute nightmare. That was until the past 2 almost 3 months which has truly been a greater nightmare. So out of approximately 10 to 11 months of service 4 to 5 months have been ridiculous.

My initial experience was one that had techs showing up for appointments before they were supposed to and then when they did show up it would be after the scheduled 3 hours that Comcast allots. I had to take time off from work on several occasions due to Comcast shoddy workmanship and then the tech would show up after the scheduled time. I could have saved my personal time and just come home at my regular time. My first tech for the install, which was on a Friday night didn’t show up till late, was in a rush because “my wife and I have a date, mom is watching the baby”. He had to leave my house within the first 5 minutes because “left ladder on last job”? Came back and had left another tool somewhere and had to go get it? He was running around and rushing the job to the degree that when he went to leave, he hadn’t even set up the box or cable in my sons room which was on the work order. He didn’t even stay long enough to make sure the computer was set up properly.

Bottom line over the next 2 weeks if not more, I had numerous techs out to my house. The phone didn’t work for almost a month. Well, it worked to call out, but I had no idea anyone was calling me because there was no ringing in to the house. The TV’s had not been set up to access the correct channels and the computer and TV’s would go out whenever my dryer went to spin cycle because the cable lines kept dropping out of the ceiling. The first time I went downstairs after the first tech came, I almost hung myself on the cable line which was down so low that in order to lift the lid on my dryer it literally hung across my neck. Several other techs came to rearrange things inside and out on several different occasions and finally things seemed to be okay.

Then it started with an every week to every other week ritual of having to call Comcast to advise that the box in my sons room which was supposed to get up to channel 200 was only getting certain stations between 1 and 99, but not even some of those that he should have. We would go thru the whole, shut the box down, wait 30 seconds turn it on and then they would have to reset wherever the person was that we had on the line. It got to be so ridiculous that from approximately February to when I turned the boxes in back in April he only got half the stations I was paying for, but I was so exasperated with the never ending phone calls and the nasty customer service and hours spent holding that I just gave up.

That is just a minimal overview of the first 2 months and longer. Now comes the totally unbelievable part to me. Apparently, it is quite common to your Customer Service personnel or else they just have the same non-caring attitude no matter what the situation is.

In the time that I became a customer, not even a year, I have never had an On-Demand charge of over $21.00. The only people in my house are myself and my 15yr old son. My parental locks were established on Channel 1 – On-Demand and NR-17 and Adult movies since the time I have had the boxes. My son has always been very mature about asking if he can request a movie before he orders. One because he usually wants to know if I want to watch with him and 2 because as a single parent not receiving child support he knows that we have to watch what we use our money on. Back in February, there were 2 occasions where we had ordered something on On-Demand and the system did something weird. My son called the first time and reported and the 2nd time I called. This was within a week of each other. Both times, we would pick a movie and request, the system would come back and say “One moment please” and then a movie would come on, but not the one we requested and it would be somewhere in the middle of the movie that was actually on. Both times, we were told that they didn’t see a movie being watched and I hadn’t been charged, so just try again. When we did, it worked fine.

Now comes the billing period of 3/24 to 4/23. My bill was current with no balance from the prior cycle. I have the package for $99.00 but as I said it was usually between $113.00 and a few dollars more per month. Imagine my surprise when this bill was for $361.18 and the ON Demand charges were $243.63. Oh and the best part was that 99% were Porn charges. Let me also mention that prior to this bill, not only was my highest On Demand charge approximately $21.00 but I had never requested any Porn since I started using Comcast. I started to reviewing the bill before I contacted Customer Service to make sure I had all my facts in order and it seemed to me that LOGICALLY, which seems to be a word that your Customer Service reps and Supervisors aren’t real familiar with, this bill had a lot of things that didn’t make sense.

There were movies that on certain dates, I’ll show example below that were ordered on the same day and a matter of minutes apart?

2/25 11:29 PM – PORN
2/25 11:35 PM – Not PORN

6 minutes apart and on a Sunday night? My son has a 9:30 TV curfew unless it is something that I have told him as an exception he can stay up a little later, which is few and far between on a night when he has school the next day. His bedroom is right next to mine and even at 15, I still have a habit of checking on him at night, so I would know if the TV was on at 11:30…

6 times between 2/16 & 2/25 it shows we watched the same movie “The Covenant”? All of these supposedly were ordered after 10:00 PM at night?

On 3/9 3 movies were ordered within minutes: Also, this was a basketball night, my son plays baseball and basketball for school and the days he has games we don’t get home till after 6. This was a game day and we were away, didn’t get home till later than 6.

3/9 5:12 PM – PORN
3/9 5:36 PM – Not PORN
3/9 6:09 – PORN

This type of thing just doesn’t make any logical sense. Why would someone or how could someone watch numerous movies within minutes of each other?

I spoke to several people within your Customer Service areas and repeatedly heard well there is nothing we can do. There is no way that anyone but someone in your house could be ordering these and we can only reimburse you for a maximum of 3 movies… 3 movies or at the most approximately $33.00 is or was definitely not going to help me with an over $300.00 Comcast bill. I told them, I would pay my normal monthly amount and any $3.99 charges that I saw were applicable. I was basically told that I would need to pay it all or my services would be discontinued. I also made mention of my prior bill amounts and why wouldn’t they have shut off my chargeable ordering since I supposedly was way over my normal charges. I got no explanation except for the fact that I would need to be 2 months behind for them to do something like that. I know for a fact that statement is not true, since my older son watched 2 sports events in one month that put his On Demand charges over $100.00 which wasn’t normal and the next time he went to request an On Demand show it told him he needed to contact Customer Service. I know other people that have told me the same exact thing.

So now I was to the point where I basically knew that the services were going to be discontinued because I absolutely refuse to pay for something that I didn’t purchase and it was quite apparent that your company didn’t really care one way or the other.

I received my bill for 4/24 to 5/23 approximately 2 weeks after this above fiasco. Well imagine my surprise when I opened it and the total due was $1290.61 with the On-Demand portion on this bill being $799.19 and this was in addition to the almost $300.00 from the previous month.

Again, after I screamed some profanities at the top of my longs with my house windows open, I get on the phone to again deal with the worst Customer Service in my life and mind you that is my background including being a Customer Service Manager. I was disconnected twice which is quite common with Comcast. I therefore had to go over the story numerous times because not only was I disconnected but I had to request Supervisors due to the rudeness and plain dissatisfaction from the service reps.

Basically all of the same issues from the prior bill but in triplicate. Some instances:

3/16 4:27 PM – PORN
3/16 4:33 PM – PORN
3/16 5:45 PM – PORN

3/18 9:41 PM – PORN
3/18 10:33 PM – PORN
3/18 10:41 PM – PORN

3/20 9:41 PM – PORN
3/20 9:43 PM -PORN
3/20 10:32 PM -PORN

I think you get the picture, this is non stop on this bill…… I finally spoke to a Chet/ floor Supervisor on 4/27,one of my more recent calls, he told me that he could definitely see that something seemed a little out of the ordinary and he would give a message to the Escalations Manager who wouldn’t be in the office until Sunday and Chet wouldn’t be back in till Monday. He promised that on Monday he would get with this person and 1 of them would definitely get back with me. I actually questioned him on that and told him that over the past month, more than a few people had promised to call me back and no one ever did and all of them would say that there were no notes from the previous people I spoke with??? Well, Monday came and went and so did a whole week with no phone calls. I called again and got a hold of a Cathy Brown who apparently is one of your Escalation employees. She was very nice and sympathetic and advised that she would check in to the problem and discuss with her Supervisor and get back to me. She also mentioned that hardly any notations showed on my account and none recently? She did get back to me the next day, but not with the information that I wanted to hear. Oh, by the way in the meantime of my conversation with Chet and Mrs. Brown, a tech came to the house to supposedly set up the parental locks on my TVs. This is not what I had been advised he would be there for. I requested that someone be sent out to check the lines and the boxes to see if someone could be accessing or bulleting my box. I explained to him what was going on, he verified that the parental locks were already established just as I said. He also went in and checked to make sure that the locks were working the correct way. I had never done this because I never had the need to since I never received any bills of this nature until the past 2 months and I could see the locks established which was the other thing I questioned your Customer Service personnel about. Guess what, he went in to ON-Demand and requested an Adult movie and it never stopped him? Obviously, something was being overridden in the boxes. He also showed me the screen that he looks at to see if a service is disabled or not and could see that the 1PPV was not? He told me and he even wrote it on the workorder to call the Call center and ask why 1PPV was not disabled if the charges were valid? He said there would be no reason that they Comcast should have allowed that many charges to continue for so long without disabling. He also noted that anything NC-17 and above was previously set as blocked before he even got there.

Even with all of the above information and the information that the tech verified, Mrs. Brown said that the reports actually show that everything had to have been ordered from my house and boxes. She said that her Supervisor had given her the ok to split the amount in half and therefore I would only be responsible for my regular charges and half of the approximately $1000.00 in On-Demand. I flatly refused. As I stated to her, if I felt that I was in any way responsible for these charges or that my son had been, I wouldn’t hesitate to pay them on time because there is no way I have that kind of money sitting around, but I stand by the fact that these charges are not mine or have they been incurred within my household and there is something malfunctioning with your digital boxes. I have read several articles, blogges and emails on line thru different Better Business bureaus and complaint forums stating that others have had this same problem and had to fight for months to get any satisfaction. I will be quite honest with you, I am tired of fighting to be treated decently and with consideration. I have had one of your Supervisors say something that was totally uncalled for when I questioned him as to whether he would be upset if his wife were to call him and tell him that there $21.00 a month On Demand charges went to $300.00 and then $800.00, he said “well my wife wouldn’t order Porn”? Logically, looking at my bills, neither had I until the problem starting in February, so I was pretty ticked off with his smugness. I also had a Support person in your drop off center when I took the boxes back tell me that “Miss we have people who have $1600.00 a month if not more charges ON-Demand so why would we stop yours?”…. Let’s see, again using logic, if that was my customary charge obviously it wouldn’t be a thought, but it isn’t so somewhere somebody should have been throwing up the red flags….

Why would your company in all fair business practices and ethical practices allow someone’s bill that never looked like that before or show an unusual activity of ordering movies of a nature that had never been requested before, let the bill run up that high and then say, well it’s not our fault, yet you’ll stop someone that ordered a $44.99 and $50 something sporting event before they can order another $3.99 movie????

It appears that Comcast is trying to get money from people by trying to wear them down with the horrible Customer Service and calls that are never returned. This was were I was at the beginning, but I am tired of companies that are blatantly taking advantage of people and have no qualms about it. I did not charge these movies and I am not going to pay for them. I sent my normal amount for the 2 bills plus the approximately 3 to 4 $3.99 charges that we have per month ($252.85), but I am not paying for any of the other charges. I received a bill today for 5/24 to 6/23 for $1236.02 with more On-Demand Porn charges till the day the boxes were turned in? One of the other interesting things is that the charges as stated by a Customer Service Rep that I spoke to on the phone on 4/24 were coming from a box that had not been plugged in to a TV? One of my phone calls prior to the tech coming out prompted me to pull the box except in the living room since your employees wanted to insist that possibly my son was watching these and I didn’t know it. The only TV with the ability to purchase On-Demand for at least a week if not more prior to 4/24 was in my living room and my son nor myself watched any PORN on it….. The box numbers that the rep said ordered those movies was the box under a chair in my bedroom as your tech can confirm that is where he saw it when he asked me if he could write down my 2 box numbers.

I would also like to note and I mentioned this to Mrs. Brown also, that on several occasions, including the day I got my $1200.00 bill, there have been techs on the pole next to my house and next to my neighbors and no one seems to know why? I live on a private lane of only 8 homes and all of us talk to each other. I was telling my neighbor about these bills and she was the one that mentioned the techs being out there for over an hour on one particular day and she had asked them what the problem was since they were blocking our lane which is one car up or down. 2 cars can’t come in and out and can’t get past each other, so she was trying to figure out how long they would be in her driveway and blocking the lane since there were 2 trucks. She didn’t get a response other than the fact that they would move the vehicles and would be leaving shortly, but according to our other neighbors no one had contacted them?

As I stated before, I am not only totally at a disbelief to the fact that my overall experience with your company since last June has been horrendous, but the fact that you can so easily just throw logic out the window and say we have no problems with our products. Mrs. Brown stated that after reviewing the reports, you could see where people would stop, rewind and restart these movies over and over? Again, in all logic, how could you possibly be doing all those thing plus changing the movies within 5 to 10 minutes of each other… Come on what was someone doing, ordering, rewind, stop, go order another movie and yet another, that makes sense to you????

I will be honest, before Comcast, I had and still have a mounted satellite on my house…. I had problems with the weather and with interference and channels changing on their own, so I decided to try Comcast but I truly wish I never had. I will admit that the reception is better and during the several months when I didn’t have to call for any reason, the programming is better than what I was getting with Satellite, but your Customer Service personnel as well as this whole On-Demand problem makes me think in the end the Satellite may still be the better way to go….

I have contacted a lawyer for advise because I have been advised that my service is ready to be discontinued and I want to know what my rights are. The only reason I am even able to do this is due to the fact that the company I work for has a legal program and the initial consult is free, but I feel my rights are being violated and I don’t need anything going on my credit report for something I shouldn’t be responsible for. I have enough financial issues as a single parent of a 15 year old and I can’t afford to pay for something that I shouldn’t have to.

I will wait for some response from you before I follow up with anyone else. Please be advised though that I stand behind the fact that the charges are not mine and I will contact whomever and whatever agencies I need to and have this matter investigated if I don’t get any satisfaction. I wish I didn’t have to do this because I am getting tired of having to rehash this over and over again, but I can’t just lay down and accept Comcast’s total illogical reaction to my predicament.

That’s porncastic.—MEGHANN MARCO

(Photo: cmorran123)

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