Complaint Review: DirecTV

2 1/2 years ago I was in an electronics store and a DirecTV salesman found me there and convinced me of how great it would be if I had DirecTV to use with my new TV.  His sales pitch was that the package that I wanted would cost $79 per month.  In order to get the deal I had to sign up there and give a credit card that they would charge monthly.  I asked about hidden charges.  He said that there were none.  The first months bill came in higher but not alot higher.  So I forgot about it until two years went by and my credit card information was stolen by someone else.  When the new card came in I went through the companies trying to transfer from the old card number to the new carefully and that’s when they got caught stealing from my card.  In addition to multiple other fees that the original salesman had not disclosed….. they claim have buried in their agreement that they are allowed to send you offers that you have to decline or they will simply sign you up for the additional services that they offer.  In my case they apparently didn’t have the correct email address or never sent the email at all.  They sent an “Offer” for “NFL Sunday Ticket” which costs about $300 a year.  I later learned that they had charged me for two years and got caught on the second.

So I called DirecTV and told them to refund the money taken from my credit card for a service that I was never “Offered” or used.  They informed me that they only were required by law to return the money that they had stolen in the last 90 days.  Actually they are a bit confused there.  There is no 90 day limitation on stealing.  In fact in the midst of this dispute they mailed me some invoices constituting mail fraud, which has a long statute of limitations.  Regardless, I could see that this huge corporation and its minions are basically immune to anything that was prior to the 90 day time that my credit card company would simply extract back my stolen money from their account for me.  I told them that I had served my 2 year contract out and wanted to stop the service.

I was sent to the customer retention department.  Customer retention stuck to the lie that they are not required to return money stolen over 90 days ago.  However, if they could just hang on to me as a customer they would give me big discounts, free new hardware, gift card and “return” the last 90 days of stolen money as a credit for future services.  And again I would have to sign up for 2 years.  Everything promised in that offer was a lie.  The retention rep tried to make confusing discount promises but I pinned him down on what the monthly totals would be going forward and wrote them down.  Later billings contain discounts for this and that.  Sometimes they do things like restate that I got hardware for $300 and it was discounted for free to me and in the confusion of their own charges and discounts the original total was off by a lot every month.  Starting the second month it was a running battle.  They have an auto-dialer that calls you to tell you to call them because you are late on your bill when it is disputed.  Of course I was not late.  I was paying the promised amount and disputing the bill.  Every phone call with a person was an argument where they told me that “the computer” said I had to pay more.  Sometimes they would “give additional discounts” which still would not bring it down to the promised amount.  After 6 months and being cut off 2x they sent a statement saying that I then owed more at that point then the entire promised for the first 6 months.  Of course I had paid the agreed amount and they cut it off before what I had paid for was used up. 

In the course of this I have learned that DirecTV is 14^th of “The Top 15 Most Hated U.S. Companies” http://www.wealthwire.com/news/global/3411 a direct quote form their ranking is “The largest complaints for this company are fall under billing issues. The most common problem is with the company changing contract details without notifying customers and then jacking up prices without authorization.”  In my experience their business model is based upon bait and switch and their staff knows it and hides behind the corporation to do it.