The sad truth is that these telcos will systematically screw millions of customers with shady fees and fraudulent billing practices, but when the FCC gets involved, they are facing potential fines of tens of thousands for each infraction, so they'll bend over backwards to get you to drop the complaint.

Try it sometime, it sucks that it's necessary, but you'd be amazed at the results.

Other tips: * Take the time to find the correct regulator... It might be in a different state than yours * Prepare a complete document with as many facts and scanned copies as you can * Clarify your desired outcome * Send everything certified mail * CC the CEO of the company with which you are fighting * If sending a follow-up letter, included scanned copies of the certified mail receipt(s) from previous communications - they cannot then argue that they did not receive your previous communication.

Nobody wants a call from the AG or a Financial Regulator!

Yes, it is terrible that this needs to be done, but it works wonders.

This , I had to do this with Comcast because of their craptastic service ,BS, and invalid billing. Trying to cancel them I kept being passed around to ALL the wrong people and departments, hung up on, refusal to give confirmation that the service was actually cancelled. Finally figured the only way they would cancel my service was to write a complaint to the FCC.

Sure enough just a few days later comcast called and apologized and cancelled my service as requested and fixed the hundreds of dollars of wrongful billing.

Although I have done a bit of a chaotic neutral thing myself: Comcast sent her two new boxes instead of one after we switched her to a cheaper box. They wanted us to drive all the way back to service center. Grabbed their UPS account # from the tracking code, filled out the web form and had it sent back with pickup billed against Comcast’s acct. She never got billed a cent.

I went to the store to return the box and they said I'd have to take a number.

I said "Nope, here's the box I'm returning, we're done here". Took some pictures and got the F out.

Returning something shouldn't take more than 30 seconds. And it wasn't going to take more than that for me.

When I've tried dealing with someone in their call center, it's been much more frustrating.

[0] https://www.elliott.org/company-contacts/charter-communicati...

https://publicutilities.utah.gov

I've reported to them in the past for things Qwest did. Seemed to be effective.

At the time of writing this, they think I'm just dandy, because I didn't respond but didn't attack them when they tried to shake me down. It'll be interesting to find out if they respond to this post ;)

Yelp would also work, if the business concerned cared a ridiculous amount about resolving complaints there. That's the only value - that these particular companies care an awful lot about resolving complaints left with the BBB.

Got bullshitted by Comcast phone rep, skipped straight to BBB complaint since I didn't want to deal with Comcast for hours/days, less than a week later I had their VIP Customer Service department calling/emailing daily until they (not me) got the issue resolved.

Perhaps an FCC complaint results in the same result, but it worked out perfectly for me.

What is important is that those companies care about BBB and are quick to fix the issue. If they didn't care about BBB I wouldn't have gone that route.

Same with Twitter. Some companies can be shamed into helping by posting on Twitter. If they didn't care about Twitter, it doesn't nothing using that medium to get help.

My advice to anyone moving into the Utah area is check the internet service provider options first. Last thing you want is to be in an area serviced only by CenturyLink.

This happened to all of Australia with Telstra/Foxtel and the NBN. We were all going to get gigabit fibre, then Rupert Murdoch and the incumbent corporations got involved. Now the 80% of us that didn't already get fibre yet are getting DSL or HFC that drops out ten times a day and can't reliably hit 15Mbit. That's right, new DSL being installed in the year 2020.

Thankfully he lives in one of the few places with multiple providers, so he told them to stuff it.

At collections, it continued like this for months, I sent photos, I even had a recording of a comcast manager saying "we shouldn't have billed you, and will remove the charge".

After 18 months of fighting this $300 charge and around 30 hours of debates... I just paid the bill

That's basically what I did with a shady property management company (AMC LLC, one of the largest in the US tried to steal my security deposit) and won, but I've heard that huge corporations like CenturyLink will even immediately follow up with a settlement offer to avoid spending an executive's time.

1. If you sue the company, any non lawyer rep can show up.

2. If you can sue the CEO over a corporate matter to force a settlement, why isn't everyone suing every rich person over everything?

2. Your guess is as good as mine.

If companies could just send you things and bill you without you ordering anything, we'd all be buried in mountains of garbage and steep debt. Keep the modem as a gift courtesy of CenturyLink. Watch your bill and if they charge for anything you haven't received, if you've got the time, file fraud claims in small claims court to recover the money.

If they intended for you to receive it but believed you were expecting it (and understood that you'd have to pay for it), then I expect that would also qualify.

In order to count as "unordered merchandise" it seems reasonable that the sender must be aware that it was unordered.

See: 39 U.S. Code § 3009 - Mailing of unordered merchandise

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/39/3009

If you're mailed merchandise that you did not expressly request or consent to, it becomes your property to do with as you will, and you cannot be billed for it. There are no exceptions for accidents.

If you receive a package that was not intended for you, that's an accident, and you are not entitled to that package. That's my core point.

If you receive a package that is intended for you, but it was a bona fide mistake on the company's part, you'd have to ask a lawyer as to whether that counts as "unordered merchandise" or not. I certainly wouldn't simply assume it is.

If it was addressed to you, whether intended or not, the law expressly states it is yours; the relevant code section has no mental state precondition.

If it's got your address on it, but someone else's name, it's not your package and you're not entitled to it (in fact, you can't even open it).

If it's got your name and address on it, but the company meant to send it to someone else named dragonwriter instead of you, it's also not your package and you're not entitled to it.

If you order item A and the company accidentally sends you item B instead, that's not "unordered merchandise", that's a mistake, and you're not entitled to treat item B as a gift.

I'm not sure what you mean by “accidental package”; specifically what kind of accident is involved.

> If it's got your address on it, but someone else's name

Then it isn't addressed to you (the verb address and noun address are related, but not in the use directly corresponding), and isn't what I was talking about.

> If it's got your name and address on it, but the company meant to send it to someone else named dragonwriter instead of you, it's also not your package

This is both generally incorrect and objectively unworkable (it would require an inquiry into the mental state of the sender before one could decide what to do with a package.) There are special cases where things would be different (e.g., there actually is another dragonwriter at the address, who actually did order the merchandise, in which case it is, obviously, not unordered merchandise that they have caused to be delivered to the first dragonwriter. But that's not even an accident or mistake on the sender's part.)

As well as the statute referenced above, the FTC provides clear and explicit guidance: if you receive it, and you didn't order it, it's yours and you may keep it. Intent of the sender is not an issue.

https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0181-unordered-merchan...

“Q. Am I obligated to return or pay for merchandise I never ordered?

“A. No. If you receive merchandise that you didn’t order, you have a legal right to keep it as a free gift.”

The reason is, the common con game where criminals would send expensive items to someone, often a recently deceased person, and demand payment. The surviving family would assume that good ol' Dad had ordered it and pay up.

The item was usually junk but with a high price tag. So the con had little to lose.

Anyway, items mailed to you without being explicitely ordered are yours to keep, legally.

Holding a package intended for someone else may well be theft (depending on particulars), just as keeping something that fell in the street is theft.

https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2009/05/update-abou...

Inactive lines are not equal to lines with no telephone service. IF there is no telephone service, 911 probably won't work. If your phone is temporarily disconnected (say for non-payment of a phone bill or the disconnect they do for folks that live in FLorida for the winter and up north for the summer), 911 will work for you.

This was definitely true for some of the states on the list provided.

I've long thought this was a sad state of affairs. Anyone with a physical phone to plug into a jack should, theoretically, be able to dial 911. I'm happy that cell phones generally allow this.

Setting an expectation of free 911 service is fine in the cellular world where its a minor nusiance to support, but in the context of a rapidly shrinking customer base (for incumbent telcos) its a very expensive burden.

911 provides a public safety service. If it means that phone companies have to provide access from their equipment or their lines, I'm OK with that. Im OK with all or part of that being reimbursed, with the main exception of requiring a new mobile to be compatable with emergency services (no worse than requiring autos to have seat belts).

Lifeline service is a public good, but funding should not come from taxing shrinking telephone bills, but instead from a different revenue source that isn't in the process of notably shrinking every year.

That said, I'm not sure how cell phone taxes wind up looking on a bill, honestly. I have weirdly never had contract telephone service. I've never been able to justify the costs. For years, I had prepaid plans (that kept getting better) in the US, then moved out of the country.

Have you considered ham radio?

By the way, back when I took the exam, I made a tiny web app to help me with the question pool: https://hamradio.zhimingwang.org/. It basically lets you quickly go over the questions, hide the ones you're confident with, then go over the rest again, rinse and repeat. The question pool might have been updated though.

It's malicious. Some of us reps try to help you out and get it all reversed. Others don't give a shit at all.

The main thing you can consider is not paying, blasting them on social media, or just keep calling until you get a nice rep who will fix it, hopefully permanently.

Our system deliberately renews/adjusts prices per gallon and service contracts to pretty much whatever price the company feels like extorting. I've seen customers charged $4000 instead of $2000 countless times. Some even pay it.

While I’m the last person to trust big business, it’s hard for me to believe that whoever is over the developers who create the billing system would put that in a spec - to deliberately overcharge people.

I’m more inclined to believe incompetence and deprioritizing known bugs to create new features.

How does intentionally writing buggy software even get communicated to the front line developers?

Who's to blame for this? The CEO and CTO I would say. They want to generate as many inflated bills as possible and then make it really hard for the customer service rep to submit an approval for it to be adjusted.

They train the reps to say, "sorry sir, this is what my computer is telling me your balance is."

The customer then either pays or leaves the company, at which point they are charged an early terminaton fee and threatened with small claims court.

So yeah, I really feel this corporation directly desires a complex and costly process since it has a near monopoly on the market and the cheaper competitors are plagued with product quality issues as opposed to service/billing issues.

For instance, you make a 12 minute, 5 second call (12.1 minutes with 6-second billing which means 60 seconds is billed in tenths of a minute) - the software records it as say, 12.6 minutes.