Mischelle was trapped. Her son picked out a new subsidized phone from Verizon Wireless, and in doing so lost his unlimited plan. He could live with a metered plan. What he didn’t know was that Verizon would retroactively change his previous month’s usage to the new plan. He took full advantage of unlimited data while he had it, which meant that his mom was on the hook for 14 gigabytes of data at $15 each. Verizon’s best offer? A $50 refund. Mischelle wasn’t going to let that stand.

She wrote to Consumerist for help.

Last month, my son went into a local Verizon store to upgrade his phone and was told that the unlimited data plans were no longer available. He agreed to a different plan with metered usage on his data.

He has been very careful to watch his usage and expected a bill in the $ 300 range for the plan and the phone.

Much to our shock, when the bill arrived, it was for over $700.

Verizon did not tell us that by switching in the middle of the billing cycle, that ALL of the data for 1 1/2 months would be metered and has billed us for 14GB of data at $ 15.00 each.

Needless to say, it has created a real hardship on our family receiving this size of billing and we are at a loss as to what we can do.

We have called Verizon and basically told that it is our fault that we did not know what their policy was and all they have offered to do is credit us $ 50.00.

Any suggestions?

Before we wrote back with any suggestions, she found our advice to contact your region president at Verizon for help when the regular customer service channels fail. It had the exact effect she wanted: a competent person with the power to fix her bill called her up.

I got in contact with the office of the president of the Midwest Region who’s number I found on Verizon’s website. I was promptly contacted after a gentleman there reviewed my account and determined the problem. After chatting, I was told that the charges would be cleared as their normal procedure of applying a cheaper plan to the current billing month obviously backfired in this case.

Mischelle, no offense, but your son was sort of a data hog, which is what made this case such an outlier. We’re glad to hear that the Region President’s office was able to sort out the situation.

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