I signed a one-year contract with WorldCom Wireless in September but received no bills until December. On November 29th, the company sent a notification of delayed billing statements, but the first bill, sent in December was accompanied by a letter questioning why I had not paid previous amounts due! At such a tardy date, I discovered that WorldCom Wireless had been charging two minutes for every call that did not go through, resulting in a bill that charging much more than the calls I actually made.
I called customer service again and was greatly relieved when a representative promised to remove all charges for the first three months because of the troubles with the service. However, no reduction of charges ever appeared on my billing statement and no one in the customer service department appears able to find record of it in the computer system.
On many occasions I spent hours on the phone trying to get in contact with the customer service department. Several times I waited over an hour and a half to reach a representative. The automated system hangs up if it decides the call load is too great. I was sometimes on hold without knowing it because there was no message or even music. Frequently after a person answered the phone, they would transfer the call to an automated system that promptly hung up! At least three times I was told by a WorldCom Wireless representative that the computers were down and that they would return my call after the computers were back up again. No one ever called me back.
Despite frequent trips to the phone dealer, the voice mail system on the phone did not work for almost four months. This was extremely inconvenient to friends, family, and coworkers who were unaware that I could not retrieve my messages. On the rare occasions that I could get in contact with a customer service representative by phone, they were at a complete loss as to what to do. Many representatives did not even know who could solve the problem and would transfer me to another person who also did not know what to do. The representatives in the store had the voice mail reset three or four times before this small technical difficulty was finally resolved in January.
In the following months of January, February, and March I paid the phone bill minus the first three months as promised, but grew more and more frustrated by the letters from WorldCom Wireless threatening to damage my credit rating.
After repeated attempts to get in contact with your customer service department by phone to resolve the matter, I decided to return the phone to the dealer, but they were no longer accepting returned phones from the company without charging a $200 fee. Out of frustration I stopped using the phone altogether, only to find that my account had been deactivated and charged $200 in addition to the hundreds of dollars of charges for calls I did not make!
To add insult to injury, WorldCom Wireless has continued to charge a monthly fee even after deactivating the account.
I simply cannot believe that a big corporation could be allowed to get away with such fraudulent behavior.
Abbas
Montgomery Village, Maryland
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