OAN Services, Inc
I was shocked to find that a $15.16 dollar charge was placed on my Verizon phone bill on Apr 15th. Here is the break down of the charges;
12.95 PrivaSafe E-Mail Svc 1X Setup Fee
00.41 Federal excise tax at 3.00%
00.78 City utility tax
01.02 State and Local Sales Tax
15.16 Total Charges
I contacted OAN billing at 1-800-892-8424 to inquire as to how the charges were placed on my phone bill as my wife and I did not authorize any such billing. They had the billing info listed under my daughters name after some more inquires it seems that they had gotten this information from an internet site. I asked them who authorized this on my phone bill and they could not give me an answer but they did agree to reverse the charges of $12.95. At that time I inquired as to the other tax charges and the lady said that this would be reversed at Verizons end when the charges were reversed. When I asked about the information that they had on hand about my billing the lady said that she could not contact Affinity Marketing systems as they were down at this time. I then called Affinity Marketing at 1-800-357-2532 to get the authorizing information from this billing and was told that they would also make sure the charges of 12.95 were reversed and to get the information I would need to send a written request to 910 Sylvan Ave Suite 115b Englewood Cliff, New Jersey 07636 along with a copy of my phone bill with the charges.
I then called Verizon at 1-800-483-3000 and talked to a service representative to inquire about their practice of billing my phone bill with out my authorization. She plainly stated that due to some deregulation they were required to let other charges be placed on my phone bill. I then asked what was the number of this deregulation at which point she could not tell me and stated that she did not have this information on hand. I then requested to speak with her supervisor and she handed me off to Doug (G209721). I again restated my question of Who gave the authorization for this charge to be placed on my phone bill? Again I was thrown the line of deregulation but he also had no information on it s number. I then inquired about the other charges that were placed in conjunction with this 12.95 charge and asked if they would be reversed at the same time? He replied that he was unsure if those charges would be and tried to point me to Affinity Marketing saying that it would have to be them to reverse those charges also. He stated that he would watch the account to see of those charges would be reversed and would call me if they were not. They also provided my account with a charge block at this time, so I guess my question is why wasn't this block already on my account?
This practice needs to be looked into closely as it seems that all parties are involved in this from the federal level all the way to the scammers. They seems to be no safe guards in place to protect anyone, all I would need is a list of addresses and phone numbers and access to a local computer and I could make a killing at this scam. I was charged $2.21 just in taxes from the federal, state and city; this would seem to be a gold mind for those municipals.
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