When I signed a two year contract with Cingular Wireless, I had only heard good things about the company from people I knew. I should have done more looking. I soon found out that they will subtract minutes that you did not use causing you to go over your allotted amount. They will also give misleading information on your online call history, again causing you to go over your minutes.
I used to keep a rough over estimate of how many minutes I was using a month, but I soon began to have problems with going over and having to pay for those expensive extra minutes. I started to check my call history on line. I noticed that a lot of minutes were being subtracted as mailbox calls when I never even set up my voicemail. I called customer service and they didn't know why that was happening and said they would look into it. They added extra minutes to make up for the 20 or so minutes that I had lost, which I thought was great. I continued to have the same problem, and the second time I called customer service they completely disabled my voicemail option in an attempt to fix the problem. The problem still persisted and the third time I called customer service I was particularly fed up with this, and not too surprisingly they refused to do anything. The customer service representative told me that Cingular Wireless can subtract anything they want according to state law. Obviously that is not true, but I felt powerless to do anything since getting a lawyer involved over $40 or so did not seem worth the time. After talking to everyone I knew and checking online, it seemed like I was the only one having this problem since everyone activates their voicemail. I seem to be the only person who can stand to miss a call these days.
I started religiously recording my calls to check with the online information to stop myself from ever going over again. I was also curious to see if there were any other weird things going on. I noticed that if I ended a call for an even minute, such as 11 minutes exactly, they would subtract 12 minutes! Calls that lasted exactly 9 minutes would be subtracted as 10 minutes. It is one thing to round up when most calls do not end like that, but they are taking minutes I did not use!
This last part is something I have not proven since I do not want to send them another extra $30 for overages just to prove my point. I noticed that all of my calls showed up just fine on my online account until I went over my minutes. On two different months I checked my online call history on the 12th of the month (new minutes start on the 15th), and it looked like I still had about 30 minutes left both times. So on both occasions I was careful to use less than the amount I supposedly had left. Somehow I ended up going over my minutes by way more than 30 minutes both times. Apparently, once I went over my minutes the call history was not accurate. While the last several calls that I had made would be there and my account would show that I had 30 minutes or so left, I would actually be over. I would then end up using even more very expensive extra minutes since it looked like I had minutes left. It seems they subtract random calls to give the appearance that the total of minutes used is accurate.
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