The Dallas Better Business Bureau informed me that they had revoked Cingular's membership because they were not responding to complaints sent to them. The Texas Attorney General suggested I sue them in small claims court, and the FCC sent them my complaint but neither followed up on their response or my rebuttal to their response. Cingular has never given a reason why they believe the charges on my account are valid, they just state they are. The facts in this dispute are undeniable. Yes, I have reams of documentation to support every fact presented here and every contact I've made trying to resolve this problem.
My Complaint - I changed my cell phone service from Cingular to Hawk on January 12 by signing a new contract with Hawk and Hawk activated my new service that same day through Cingular. Cingular continued to bill me for monthly service, long distance and their other charges from 1/12/02 to 2/21/02 in the amount of $209.38. Cingular now says they have credited my account for the monthly service charges after 1-12-02, but refuse to credit my account for the long distance charges from 1/14/02 to 1/18/02, or any of the "Other" charges, the "Taxes, Surcharges or Assessments", or the charges for Detailed Billing for the period 1/12/02 to 2/21/02 even though I was also paying Hawk for unlimited long distance and these other charges as of 1-12-02. If they tell you they have added other credits to my account the truth is not within them. Ask for details, dates and amounts, and hear them stutter.
Reasonableness would dictate that you cannot be charged twice for the same service. Cingular's response to these facts has always been Tough Luck, our billing process takes 3 to 4 weeks to stop and although we do have the discretion to correct our billing processes errors, in your case we choose not to. All disputed charges are after 1-12-02 which is the day my contract with Cingular ended, but the charges kept rolling on for another 40 days.
Cingular's failure to deny the facts as I have presented them above indicate that they have become a too big to adequately care for their customers and that reasonableness and fairness are lacking in their operating process. They are hoping that the FCC is too over-burdened to act on one individual's behalf and the BBB and TX Attorney General also have no influence. This would suggest that if they can treat me unfairly, Cingular can also get away treating a good percentage of their customers the same way, because since they are so large, who cares if they run off scores of their customers every day. Being kicked out of the BBB should additionally indicate that they are indeed unresponsive to a large number of consumer complaints.
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