Verizon Customer Gets $1,500 After Years of Ghost Charges

Verizon customer paid $1,500 over 5 years for a landline she thought she cancelled

verizon early termination fee — Ken Wolter/Shutterstock

Once you cancel something, you don’t expect to deal with it again. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened with New Jersey resident Lauraine Hollyer, who was charged for a dead landline for five years, reports NJ.com.

According to the report, Hollyer cancelled her family’s second landline at least 14 years ago, since her children had cellphones instead. Weirdly enough, when Hollyer looked over her April 2015 Verizon bill, she noticed there was a $25.94 charge for message rate service and line maintenance. Hollyer deducted the charge from the bill, but she decided to look over previous bills in order to find out where this charge came from.

Hollyer found that she had been paying that same $25.94 a month for her previously cancelled landline since April 2010, bringing the total to $1,500.28.

Understandably, this caught Hollyer by surprise, since she wasn’t billed for the cancelled landline for almost a decade. She admits it was a mistake to not check the Verizon bills, but she also believes she has a “right to expect that when a bill is submitted it is correct and that charges for something that has not been charged for over nine years won’t all of a sudden magically show up.”

Hollyer initially contacted Verizon about the $1,500 mishap on June 2, only to be told that the carrier would only refund three months’ worth of charges. She couldn’t connect to a manager that might have opened the refund up a bit more, and she even contacted Verizon chief financial officer Francis Shammo to no avail.

Unfortunately, all these calls did was have Verizon send her a letter, saying that her service would be suspended if she didn’t pay “overdue” charges for April and May. That particular dilemma was overturned, though Hollyer still couldn’t get anything better than a three-month refund.

That’s when she reached out to NJ.com, which then reached out to Verizon vice president Tom Maguire about the issue. According to Maguire, he looked into the dilemma and decided to issue Hollyer a $1,500 refund. In addition, he said that Verizon would talk to the people who didn’t follow through with the calls back that they promised Hollyer.

Hollyer is happy that she will get a proper refund, though she’s not too thrilled with Verizon customer support.

“Service agents need to be taught to follow through with their promises,” said Hollyer. “Supposedly everything is written down on the computer so they should have to check back on a weekly basis to see that what has been promised did in fact occur.”

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