Verizon Wireless lies to close the deal, refuses to honor their promise

UPDATE: On September 7, 2018, the people responsible for handling complaints sent to the office of the CEO of Verizon finally agreed to refund the charges for the five lines I only switched to VZW because their sales representative lied to me. I shouldn’t have been lied to in the first place, and their customer service people should have been able to resolve my complaint without forcing me to escalate to the office of the CEO, but at least they did the right thing in the end. Morals of the story: (1) When a company rips off, keep pushing until you get satisfaction; I’ve found that a letter to the CEO almost always works. (2) Don’t use Verizon unless you have no other choice because they have coverage somewhere you need that no one else has.

Capital One
P.O. Box 30285
Salt Lake City, UT 84130-0285

Ref: Card number [elided], Account number [elided]

I am writing to dispute the charge to my account by Verizon for $416.02, dated August 23, 2018 and posted August 24, 2018. We should only have been charged $113.69, for the reasons explained below, and I expect the difference to be refunded immediately.

I transferred six cellular telephone lines from T-Mobile to Verizon Wireless on August 8. I did the transfer in person in a Verizon Wireless store. The sales representative at the store lied to me: he told me that we would have 8GB of data monthly per line, when in fact the plan only provides 8GB of data monthly in total, across all six lines.

Nothing about the plan was provided to me in writing before the transfer was finalized. Even after the transfer was finalized and we were emailed various documents in writing, all the documents said was “8 GB Shared Data,” i.e., nothing was explicit about the fact that the data allotment was per plan rather than per line. I interpreted the ambiguous information we were given to mean the latter, since that’s what the sales representative told us.

I want to be absolutely clear here. Our family uses much more than 8GB of data per month. I knew that on August 8 when I walked into the Verizon Wireless store. I would never have agreed to a plan providing us with only 8GB of data per month if the sales representative had been honest with me that that’s what we were getting. I agreed to the line transfer on August 8 only because I was lied to.

About ten days later I realized the truth, when our data ran out. I contacted Verizon Wireless customer service via direct messaging in Twitter, explained to them what had occurred, and demanded that they do something to honor the promise made to us by their sales representative. They refused to do anything except to repeatedly attempt to sell me a more expensive plan.

I told them that if they were not going to offer some sort of accommodation to provide us with at least some of the additional data we were promised without charging us more than $50 more per month, we were going to switch five of our six lines back to T-Mobile at the earliest opportunity. (I was unable to make the switch back immediately because I was traveling, and I could only switch back five of the six lines because we have no choice about leaving one of our lines on Verizon because it belongs to my daughter who just started college on a campus where only Verizon has decent signal strength.)

After they once again refused to offer me any help, I logged into the Verizon Wireless web site to switch to a different plan with unlimited data, so that we would be able to keep using data on our phones for a few days until I was able to transfer five lines back to T-Mobile.

Because we were deceived by Verizon’s sales representative into purchasing six lines of service, and we would only have bought one line of service if they had told us the truth, we should not have to pay a single cent for those five lines of service we were fraudulently sold.

A few days later, after I successfully transferred five lines of service back to T-Mobile, I contacted Verizon Wireless again. I explained to them that since we were sold five lines of service fraudulently and had canceled those lines of service as soon as possible after discovering the fraud, we should not have to pay either service or activation fees for those five lines. Since the one line of service we left on Verizon costs $83.69 per month, and the activation fee for it was $30, we should be charged only $113.69, not the $416.02 their web site said they would be charging us on August 23.

They refused to make this adjustment.

I have attached the transcript of the entire conversation I had with Verizon Wireless customer support.

Please do the needful.

Encl:

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