In 25 years of paying bills by check through the mail, SST is the ONLY company I have ever done business with that claims to have lost my check (implying it was never recieved), twice! After SST phoned to say that they didn't have the check, and blaming the U.S. Postal service for losing it, they said that they could make an Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) from my bank account to make the payment.
After agreeing, SST said they would charge a service fee of $10 to accomplish the EFT. I said absolutely not and hung up the phone, without providing a bank account number to accomplish the EFT. Next I went to SST's website to create an on-line bill pay account, immediately paid the bill on-line, without fees, and then phoned my bank to stop payment on the "Lost" check. Problem solved, no thanks to SST, right? Wrong! Roughly 3 weeks later I receive a notice in the mail from SST stating "The above referenced check was returned by your bank; Returned Item Charges Due: $25."
At first SST couldn't ding me for $10, so they created a way to do it for $25!!
The verbage in SST's letter is very cleverly worded, making it easy to be mislead. How could a check that I sent to SST, have been returned by my bank? The check was never in my bank's possession to return it. Who did the bank return it to? I don't have it and SST claims they never did.
After calling "Customer Service" at SST to dispute the new $25 fee, SST claims it was because payment was stopped on the check. Now, in order for SST to know that payment was stopped on the check, they must have attempted to cash it! The check they said they didn't have!!!
As a result of forcefully insisting that I was NOT paying the new $25 fee, the "Customer Service" agent said that he would leave a note for his supervisor to review the dispute and the review would take 24-48 hours. I demanded to speak directly and immediately to the supervisor and, after a minute or two on hold, I was connected to a supervisors voice mail box.
I don't yet know what SST's decision is in regard to the $25 fee, but I can only guess. I also wonder what new fee's they are going to attempt to extort from me in retribution for asserting my consumer rights.
How many others are there that SST is attempting to defraud, $10-$25 at a time, one customer at a time, multiplied accross their entire customer base. All the while knowing that their customers can't directly contact each other or know who the others are, thus significantly reducing the possibility of a chance customer-to-customer encounter to compare "questionable" accounts receivable practices at SST?
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