This Consumer's Negative AT and T Wireless Experience

A few years ago, I had a horrible experience with AT&T wireless.

I had signed up for their 650 minute plan, for three reasons.

I enjoyed making calls.
I figured I'd never go beyond 650.
I got a phone with the plan that kept track of total airtime.

And indeed, at first everything went fine. Then around the 3rd month as I remember it, to my dismay I got a bill showing that I went over my allotment.

I'm a skeptical guy. If someone tells me to "just believe," or tries to persuade me to just give in or not put up any resistance, no matter what the context I resist and sometimes strenuously and militantly. I absolutely hate corruption, especially corporate corruption.

As it happens, the customer service person had said that if I wanted to contest any bill, I would need to show them written evidence of all my calls -- other than the bill itself. So I began keeping a log: writing down each and every call.

I soon found this was a tedious process, so I shortened my log entries it to just the phone numbers. Meanwhile I reduced the amount of calling I did to about half.

Despite that, lo and behold 3 months after the first problem I got a bill claiming I had gone over my minutes again. So I compared the list of calls that they claimed I had made to the calls that I had written down. The lists were different.

I saw a great many calls that were not in my log. Yet the numbers all looked familiar. Then I realized what they had done. They had re-dated calls from 3 months ago, adding them to my current bill. These were calls that had mostly already appeared on previous bills.

I called up customer service to complain and they denied any wrongdoing. They claimed enthusiastically that re-dating and duplicating of calls is strictly illegal therefore they would never do it. I told them that clearly that is what they had done and they had broken the law. Therefore now, I said, they must fix their mistake and redeem themselves. They refused.

At one point they condescendingly told me I must have somehow forgotten to write down all my calls, and that nothing was re-dated. Later they claimed that some calls appear on bills as many as 3 months after being made, which I dismissed because the duplicated calls were clearly on previous bills.

So I reviewed with them the fact that I had written down all my calls, every single one, and stated that in good faith I could fax them my logs, but that I expected a good faith response.

At this point, they warned me that if my handwritten call logs were not perfectly legible, or did not include both phone numbers and durations and time of calls, they would be rejected (as I recall it). Clearly they were searching for any excuse to do nothing and deny their unlawful practice.

In the end, I had to file complaints with the FCC and the Federal Trade Commision. After a few months, I got a call from AT&T Wireless offering to improve the situation, but they never admitted any wrongdoing. I will never deal with AT&T Wireless again, nor with their new parent company Cingular.