I was getting ready to pay my phone bill last night when I noticed that it was much higher than normal. Usually our phone bill only runs about $23 a month but the bill for April was $36. That was when I noticed the $13.56 bill from ZPDI / Legacy LD Intl Inc. The call was listed as a 5-minute operator assisted collect call from a neighboring city and it was supposedly made at 1:37pm.
Well I knew this was impossible for several reasons. First of all, my roommate and I do not accept collect calls unless it is an emergency and we would definately remember it if we had accepted such a call. Second, and most importantly, we were both at work during the time this supposed call was made. Therefore we could not have possibly gotten a collect call - much less spoken to somebody on the phone for 5 minutes.
I immediatly send an email to both Verizon and the website listed on my bill as it was too late to call either company. This morning I called the number listed for ZPDI and spoke to a man who said the call would be removed from my bill.
I thought everything was taken care of until I went back to the Verizon website and started to pay my bill. That was when I noticed that the March bill (which I am ashamed to say I hadn't even gotten around to looking at) also had a 5-minute operator assisted collect call from the same day from the same city but this time it was supposedly made at 4:57pm.
Well, I checked my work schedule and sure enough that was one of the days that I had worked late and my roommate was in class at the time this call was supposedly made. So I called ZPDI back and disputed the charge. But this time they insisted that we had made both calls and we were fortunate that they were removing the one call but we have to pay for the other call.
I totally lost my temper and wound up arguing with the guy for at least 10 minutes threatening to call the FCC, the Public Utilities Commision and whatever other agency would listen. Still he refused to remove the other charges on my bill.
I finally hung up on the jerk and called Verizon who was no help at all. I had already called earlier and a spoke to a man who told me it would be best if I just paid the bill and if ZPDI removed the charges I would be credited for that amount. But they could not remove the charges themselves.
This time I spoke to a lady who seemed sympathetic enough - even telling me I wasn't the only victim of this scam but there was nothing they could do. Of course she happily gave me the info to contact the FCC (I had already gotten the info to contact the public utilities commision on my first call).
One disturbing thing that the lady from Verizon told me is that, because some collect calls simply require a person to push '1' on a touch-tone phone to accept the call, the beep from an answering machine can be interpreted by the automated system as somebody pushing the number '1' on their phones. This means that an answering machine can actually accept a collect call even when there is nobody around to accept the call. Of course my machine times out after only a minute so there is no way it could have accepted two 5-minute collect calls.
Bottom line is that I am stuck paying $13 for a call that was never made and there doesn't seem to be anything I can do about it.
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