Reader D. is having a rough time financially right now. Technically, he’s homeless, but he’s staying with a friend while he gets his life back together. As you can imagine, he doesn’t have a lot of money to spare. Which is why he now is without grocery money after Comcast kept on auto-debiting his account even after he left his apartment and turned off his service.

Lately, I’ve hit hard times. Luckily, I have a place to stay with a friend, but it’s the first time in my life I’ve had to consider myself homeless.

In December, I notified my landlord and utilities that I’d be moving out – including Comcast, who’d been charging me nearly $70/mo. for Internet service. I cancelled my Comcast service on December 28th after speaking with a supervisor in billing, and returned my equipment promptly to their [local] office. I asked a Comcast technician who was on site at my apartments if he’d take it in, but they’re not allowed to, causing lots of extra trips to the company’s huge [local] complex.

I checked my bank account this morning to make sure I’d have enough money to kick in some shekels for food while I’m staying with a friend, and saw that I was overdrawn as of the 20th of January – thanks to Comcast’s failure to stop billing me for service.

I called, and they offered to credit my account, which is in my ex-wife’s name. I asked if they could get me the money back, since they took it without my authorization and against my wishes, and the response from [Z], their supervisor, was “a check will be mailed to you within 4-8 weeks”.

When pressed, [Z] offered to escalate the request for a direct debit of monies back to my account, but could promise nothing.

How is it legal for Comcast to take my money “accidentally”, then refuse to immediately replace it? Are they aware that EFT works both ways? The local TV news has no interest in pursuing stories like this because they are an NBC affiliate. And guess who owns NBC?

We suggested that D. contact Comcast’s ace Twitter team of executive customer service ninjas, but he said that he already did, and they aren’t able to help him get his money any faster, either. He had this to add about his dealings with “escalated” customer service.

They offer to escalate ‘my issue’ to someone with a five-digit extension who will tell me the exact same thing – that they accidentally subtracted funds from my EFT account, overdrafting me; that they regret that I don’t have food money for the month; that they can’t draft the money back to me for several weeks, at best, and then only with a check.

I asked them to call outside of 2:00-4:00 Pacific time, as I had a job interview scheduled. Guess when they called? 2:30 Pacific.

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