Shady billing from IED phone services

For them to have your mother's maiden name this is information only
found when you give it...which can mean that they "borrowed" your
information for their company and tried to slam you with a LD phone
service.

I know AT&T land line has to offer a LD carrier and if you did not
choose one, one was chosen for you. This had to be done last year if I
remember correctly...and they assigned me a LD carrier, I called them
had them remove it and also called the LD carrier to make sure they
knew I was not taking their very high priced service.

But this company sounds like they did this only by obtaining
information via credit reports probably which is legal if said
customer is applying for service.

To get a better understanding of what this company does, go to
www.ildteleservices.com and read, under Top Quetions, "What service
does ILD provide".

As a telecom billing analyst I advise everyone to review their phone
bills every month in order to detect these types of billings.

the slamming practice that cropped up several years back where smaller
companies were switching people's carriers?

Sometimes if you are getting info, even on Monster.com, and you don't
pay attention, there are little screens that pop-up in between and if
you don't check "No Thanks" it sends all your personal information to
that 3rd party. Sometimes they are sneaky about it and it will
default to the "yes" response and if you're just clicking through and
not paying close attention to what you're responding to, you
inadvertently authorize a legitimate company to send all your personal
information over to another organization.

But I agree, in this day and age, it shouldn't be happening!

I wonder how many people companies like this "take" for hundreds of
dollars before they realize they've been scammed like this? It truly
is a scummy business practice.

I haven't had a chance to call Verizon, but I am on Monday first
thing! I cannot believe this is happening in this day and age.

Verizon should have helped you more. I just had this happen to me as
well and Qwest was more helpful than Verizon. Qwest said this was
another case of "slamming" and they have a process of working with the
PUC (Public Utilities Commission). Qwest removed the charges and they
said they'd deal with the fraud complaint. It happens often enough
that they have a system in place to deal with this. Verizon should as
well.

I think you should contact Verizon again, let them know what you found
out, and find out if there's any kind of a block you can put on your
account so this can't happen again.

Good for you for being vigilant! Imagine if you hadn't opened your
statement and just let automatic payments take care of it for you!

Thanks I willd i do that.

Or is there a "slamming" also? I just did a few minutes of searching,
and what I found was horrifying. Evidently the complaints about this
practice go back 10 years.

I'm not sure the phone company can block against this, as ILD can
process charges for all kinds of companies (not just long distance
phone charges).

It sounds, from the brief search I did, that companies obtain your
information through fraudulent "offers", and then go to the ILD
clearing house to have the charges applied to your phone bill. Some
of these companies actually create a phone "conversation" as proof you
called them.

The fact this has been going on for years is unacceptable. Evidently
the phone company gets a few cents for each transaction. I guess they
don't have much incentive to see it stopped or cleaned up. Ugly.