Complaint Review: At&t

I had the similar experience & can't for the life of me understand how it can be legal for a busisness to attach themselves to another business's billing. Your contract is with AT&T.

In addition, customer service on the phone, when I was able to get ahold of them was not helpful, nor did they offer to block the 3rd party billings.

It did happen through an internet transaction, for which anyone could use your number. I realized that when I was filling something out & read the fine print that you could dispute it in certain states, meaning either certain states do not allow it to happen in the first place, or perhaps ATT will take care of for you. I'm guessing it's the first one.

I did manage to contact one of the billers and he was very pleasant and said he would take care of it. The other one only had an answering machine to call in your discontinue duspute. Hmmm, only an answering machine that only receives calls during regular business hours. Something fraudulent happening there!

Anyway, contacting ATT Corporate through their website, they did, I think, take them off, however I haven't received a bill yet, so I'm not certain, although fairly confident that they did the math incorrectly. But she did offer me a free service to block additional 3rd party billing in the future. Lucky me, it was free!

Unfortunately, my phone no longer makes long distance calls & I no longer have caller id. It seems their automated system decided that I requested this reduction in services and have not had that functioning yet.

All that for a line that's plugged into the wall? There fees are outrageous & the customer service is very poor.

Late last year (Oct. '08) I was also victim of the same thing - in a big way. I had five or six separate charges from four different companies appended to my AT&T bill. I found out several interesting things during his ordeal:

Anyone can use your phone number (land line or cell) to charge voicemail, fraud protection, or other things by unscrupulous companies out there. (In my case I had multiples on one bill.)

These companies do not verify the correctness of any associated information of the account, as long as they get a valid phone number.

Phone companies, by default, append these charges to your bill.

To avoid this from happening, you can call your carrier and ask them to lockout your number from these charges, and it will ensure no one can steal your umber in the future.

AT&T was very helpful in my case. They told me to not pay the charges, marked them as fraudulent, and although late fees showed up for a couple of months, I was able to call each time and get them removed.

However, I still had to call the 800 numbers of each of the offending companies and cancel the fraudulent charges. It took over three months to clear them all.

During these calls, I asked what other info they had on record like name, address, etc. Most were grossly incorrect! Wrong names, addresses, etc. That's how I found out how little oversight these crooks have, and how vulnerable you phone number alone can be.

I NEVER put my correct phone number into ANY websites anymore.
I also requested AT&T to lockou my number from outside charges without my permission.

I think these companies depend on people not noticing the extra charges, many of them were $10-25. Many phone bills fluctuate by that much. I noticed, because of how many came at me at once, totally nearly $80 extra in one month!

I hope others can learn from my experience. But do not blame AT&T or your carrier.

Call the other company and find out why they are billing you. It might be that you filled out something online and didn't uncheck a box. OR you didn't read everything, including the fine print in the Terms of Service.

AT&T or John Doe's service cant really help you IF you authorized the other company to bill you via AT&T.