We purchased three telephones for one account; one was given to my little brother as an "emergency use only" phone; unbeknownst to him, the phone was stolen from him; as this was an emergency use only cell phone and was kept in a pocket in his backpack, we had no way of knowing the phone was missing.
AT&T sure knew the phone was stolen: the thief wracked up nearly $7,000 in international phone calls (mind you, we NEVER requested international service; it was added without our consent more than six months after we opened the account); for the year the phone was in my brother's possession, the phone bill never totalled more than $30 and not even an out of state call was placed, much less an international call.
To make a long story short, AT&T calls on the last day of the billing cycle and says "you didn't make these calls, did you?" Of course, we are now alerted to the missing phone and tell AT&T to cancel service on this cellular phone. However, AT&T claims that we are responsible for this monstrosity of a phone bill. The irony is that I am sure AT&T ran a credit check sometime within this billing cycle to ensure that we had sufficient income to pay an enormous phone bill.
However, this due diligence didn't include a simple customer courtesy phone (maybe when the FIRST $1000 was charged) to verify phone usage that was astronomically divergent from the prior phone usage.
We have even attempted to file a criminal report with the local police department to track down the thief; unfortunately, AT&T would have to cooperate with the filing of the criminal complaint and for reasons that will never be clear to me they steadfastly refuse to do so.
So basically, we have told AT&T to go to HE double hockey sticks if they expect to receive a fat check for facilitating the theft of a customer's service plan. Anyone considering doing business with this company should certainly think twice.
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