Proration of Final Bill

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@braintumormom wrote:

I cancelled my service on the first day of the new billing period.  Now I owe $146.28 and they are threatening me with collections.  Three different service reps told me I would get a pro-rated bill.  I don't need stress in my life right now, so I guess I have to pay it.  Nobody in my family will ever use AT&T again.  They are all going to switch since I can't get this resolved.  Enjoy my hard earned $146.28 AT&T.  

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Please keep in mind in all likelihood your new carrier does not prorate either (none of the big 4 do and neither do most of the others). Sorry you got bad information.

That said, I'm with a cellular company for the cellular coverage. If AT&T is who I need to get the coverage that I need, I'm not going to stay with someone else out of spite.

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@braintumormom wrote:

I cancelled my service on the first day of the new billing period.  Now I owe $146.28 and they are threatening me with collections.  Three different service reps told me I would get a pro-rated bill.  I don't need stress in my life right now, so I guess I have to pay it.  Nobody in my family will ever use AT&T again.  They are all going to switch since I can't get this resolved.  Enjoy my hard earned $146.28 AT&T.  Be happy knowing that you aggravated a very ill person.

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@braintumormom

Service is month to month, not day to day.  There is only one carrier, google Fi, that does prorate.  Every other carrier in the USA bills for the month, no refunds.

They did it to me also.

I called before the billing cycle began and told them that I had no intention of entering a new billing cycle. I told them that I had ordered a phone from Project fi and had selected to Port my number but I also did not care enough about the number to pay a full month's charges in order to keep it. So I asked them to suspend the service or whatever needed to happen to prevent being charged for the next billing cycle. When I got my new phone (waited because the ATT phone was damaged to the point of being nearly unusable in that i had to pull the battery out reboot it and squeeze it a certain way to keep the screen from flashing on and off uncontrollably, just so that I could get to the dialer so that I could call ATT.) They absolutely refuse to bend on charging me the full month and I have been threatened with the "pay it or we will send it to collections" bit.

Throughout my 30 month interest free finance based contract with AT&T I have been treated terrible. I have never had such a terrible experience with any company in my entire life. First I would like to say that when I sat down in an AT&T store with the intentions of leaving Sprint (for their having routed all my customer service calls to the Philippines allowing for no way to speak to anyone within the US) , I do not remember the salesman showing me the physical terms of service. I've never experienced this before because I had sprint for 18 years before I left them. What a stupid policy to screw the customer who wants to leave because they have been treated like crap.

Throughout service I had a warranty claim kicked back in my face when I mailed back the old device. I followed the instructions and packed the phone up in the same box in which they sent me the replacement device. Back then they did not include any bubble wrap. They had a peice of cardboard with a plastic strap on it. I was to tuck the phone behind the plastic strap and then bend the two side tabs of the cardboard behind so that the plastic stretched and held the phone to the board. I packed it into the box they told me to use and I sealed it up and applied their supplied shiping label and sent it off. 2 months later I was told that the entire price was being charged to my account because it had been receied with a cracked screen. The screen was not cracked when I mailed it. So I called several times and spoke to several managers trying to get this fixed. I even offered to use my insurance and pay the deductable if they would allow me to send back their warranty device if they would take the price of the phone off my bill. The refused that. When I asked them to use the Shipping insurance which any reputable company would obviously pay for on their supplied shipping label since the plan is to ship a 700 dollar phone through the US mail. They informed me that they do not pay for shipping insurance. W T F? The also refused to split up the payment of this charge over the coarse of several bills so that it would be easier to pay for it and I was told to pay the bill or they would suspend my account and send me to collections.

So later on I ended up having problems with that replacement phone and had to call warranty again so this time they sent me a different kind of phone because the old one was not being stocked any more. Unfortunately a few days after i received that phone, it was stolen from me and ATT was absolutely unhelpful when I asked them to help me track the phone. They said there was no way they could locate the phone. However I was able to use google to trace where the phone had traveled up until the point where it vanished (someone turned it off and never back on). At that time I chose to wait a week before calling insurance to see if the phone turned up from being lost. During this time I made several calls to AT&T from my laptop using google Hangouts and spent more time having to call back and explain my situation than actually getting help. I kept getting disconnected, put on hold where nobody came back, and being told that I was being transfered to another department only to find out that I had been placed back at the begging of the line in a call block. Each time I got disconnected, it was very disheartening to have to start from the very beginning of my story with the new Rep. Due to the fact that I do not pay for home phone service because I live alone in an apartment and because I was using a laptop + google hangouts to make outgoing calls, I had no phone number on which I could receive phone calls. So even IF a Rep wanted to call me back, they could not. When I finally got ahold of the loyalty department, I told them that I wasn't sure that it was worth it to me to pay 250 dollars for insurance deductable just so I can keep my service with AT&T and their terrible service. So after batting that around with them for a while, I had a Loyalty Supervisor offer to send me a "temporary phone" that I could use until I was able to straighten out the problems with getting my v20 replaced AND as a loyalty maneuver intended to help convince me to stay with AT&T. I could have paid less than the insurance deductable at this point to pay off my phone and leave early but I decided to stay. She told me that it would not be a great phone, but it would be a Samsung K3 which is not all too bad either. She said that I was welcome to use and keep that phone when I get my v20 also. I had a family member in the same room as me listening onto the speakerphone call and this person heard ALL of this. I was told that they would ship the "Courtesy Phone" the following monday as this support call occured on a saturday evening. I was told that I should expect to see the phone in 5 to 7 business days. I felt all warm and fuzzy by the end of the call because It seemed as though the people at AT&T truely DID want my business and to treat me accordingly. Flash forward 2 weeks. I begin a call to AT&T customer service and ask to speak to a Supervisor straight off, opting not to waste the time explaining my current problem to the lower level rep. I explained to the Supervisor (who sai they were in the loyalty department) that I had been waiting for a "Courtesy Phone" which should have been shipped about 2 weeks ago and that I had not yet seen the phone arrive. I asked how much longer will I have to wait for this phone only to hear a disheartening response. "We did not send a Courtesy Phone nor would we ever do that." So I explained the previou call I had with the loyalty department and I told this person the name of the Supervisor who told me they sent the phone out. I was told that there were no notes on the account regarding this what so ever and they did not believe anyone would tell me that I would be give a phone. I was being called a liar. So first I was lied to by a Supervisor, then I was essentially CALLED a liar. Needless to say; I WAS FURIOUS!!!! Not only was I being lied to and having my character assasinated, but I now had spent THREE FULL WEEKS WITHOUT A PHONE! That was it for me, I told them that I vowed to leave AT&T as soon as I could do it by sending them the least amount of money as possible. No early payoff of my phone because that costs an extra 25 to do so. Nope I'm not sending you ANY extra money that I don't have to.

Following the above incident, I decided to call Asurion. I had to pay the deductable on my phone to get a replacement. By this time my Samsung Galaxy S6 Active had become obsolete by their standards and they had quit stocking them. So I was told that they would have to send me a different phone. I liked the S6A because it was a rugged phone and water resistant and I'll be the first to admit that I am tough on phones. So every phone I get goes directly into a Case and I get a tempered glass screen protector for them. I managed to convince the Asurion rep to give me a list of different phones I could choose from and allow me a few minutes to web search their specs. I decided on the LG V20.

Flash forward a few months of service with my LG v20 replacement phone from Asurion, and I had begun to really like my phone when the twin rear cameras failed. I called AT&T who told me to clear the camera App data and cache in hopes that it would fix the cameras. Nope. Try factory reset. After I lost all my settings and configurations, I found that move did not fix it either. So at this point I decided that I would live without cameras for a while because I only had a few months left of payments on my phone before my account was Out of Contract and I'd be able to go to another carrier. A couple months pass and the phone screen began flashing on off on off on off non stop and I had no choice but to call and claim a warranty replacement again. I only had a month left of service but I needed a phone. Besides, I had paid for two full price phones and at that moment i had 0 fully working phones. I paid for it, I was entitled to a working device! So I warrantied it. I was very weary about sending in this phone with all these problems because I thought that they might try to say that the problems were some kind of damage with me being at fault. The phone's body was in good condition however and I had never exposed it to water. But anyone with experience with phone warranties and cell phone's in general probably has seen where those moisture stickers on the battery have turned pink even though you never once got the phone wet. So maybe they would try to say something like that. I was paranoid! So I called and talked to several reps about this and was directed to go to an AT&T corporate store and have the phone inspected and "Smart Scanned." So I went. The manager at the store told me he couldn't help me because the screen would not stay on for him to do the scan so he sent me on my way having made no notes on my account. This would not do. So I called back and got somebody to make notes on the account instructing the next manager that they had to inspect the phone and put notes on the account regarding the condition. So another trip to a store. I went to a different location. This time I got the manager to say the phone looks good enough for a warranty claim and that the Smart Scan was a success. He was able to do it, imagine that! So after all those problems, we are brought up to the point where I was trying to leave.

I Called and actually told an AT&T rep that I had no intention of entering another month of service and that I wanted them to do whatever they had to do to make that possible. If they had to suspend the phone service, I told them that would be fine. I had already placed my order over the internet for my new phone with project fi and I had selected "port number" as one of the options when I signed up. This was prior to calling and telling them that I didn't want to be billed again. I told them this BEFORE the new bill period started. I made this call Dec 21 or 22 and I actually called back on the 24th to make sure they shut the account off becuase STILL had an active phone. They told me that the billing period started Dec 24th and the billing department was closed that day. So I said "that is not my fault OR my problem. be sure that I don't get billed for another month please." So anyway I got billed for another month. I didn't care if the port was declined or whatever. I had wanted to avoid a full bill being charged. But they did not help me. Now I have called several times to get this fixed and was ACTUALLY TOLD that all I have to do is pay the full pric of the bill and then AT&T would make the adjustments for services not rendered and it would be mailed back to me at the address on my bill. 

I got my bill and decided to call back and talk about this some more because I did not feel like that made any sense. To send them a full bill payment and then be forced to wait for a refund..... only to be told that NO. You wont be receiving anything. This is our (stupid) policy. So again I was lied to by an AT&T rep. I have no repercussion but to contact the BBB.org about this. So I will probably send a story very similar to this very one to the BBB through the use of their website.

What can be learned from my experiences?

Do NOT EVER use AT&T services. They will give you the runaround. They will over charge you. They wont protect your warranty returns and if they get damaged in shipping, They will charge you. And finally, when you have had enough and you want to leave them..... they will bill you a full month even though they didn't listen to you when you told them to suspend service prior to the new billing cycle and subsequently they will refuse to prorate it. Shame on this company. I promis to bash AT&T every chance I get. I will keep somebody from signing up with them if I have to tell them that AT&T sneaks in your house at night and steals your underwear and farts on your pillows.

I repeat myself a bit, but that's due to the repeated repeatedness.

@KirkH420 wrote:

They did it to me also.

I called before the billing cycle began and told them that I had no intention of entering a new billing cycle.

The only way to NOT enter a new billing cycle is to cancel your plan.

I told them that I had ordered a phone from Project fi and had selected to Port my number but I also did not care enough about the number to pay a full month's charges in order to keep it.

They really don't care about the what and how. You chose when to sign up with GoogleFi, AT&T didn't.

So I asked them to suspend the service or whatever needed to happen to prevent being charged for the next billing cycle.

Only canceling will do this. 

I Called and actually told an AT&T rep that I had no intention of entering another month of service and that I wanted them to do whatever they had to do to make that possible.

You needed to cancel.

If they had to suspend the phone service, I told them that would be fine.

Suspension doesn't stop billing.

I had already placed my order over the internet for my new phone with project fi and I had selected "port number" as one of the options when I signed up. This was prior to calling and telling them that I didn't want to be billed again.

You can't just tell a company to "stop billing me". You need to cancel the service.

I told them this BEFORE the new bill period started. I made this call Dec 21 or 22 and I actually called back on the 24th to make sure they shut the account off becuase STILL had an active phone.

In your epic long version of your sage, you don't say that you actually asked them to CANCEL.

They told me that the billing period started Dec 24th and the billing department was closed that day. So I said "that is not my fault OR my problem. be sure that I don't get billed for another month please." So anyway I got billed for another month.

That's because you didn't cancel.

What can be learned from my experiences?

If you don't want to pay for a service, be certain to CANCEL it?

they will bill you a full month even though they didn't listen to you when you told them to suspend service prior to the new billing cycle and subsequently they will refuse to prorate it.

Billing for a full month is part of your agreement.

I'm pretty sure that Verizon, Sprint and T-Mo do the same time.

@KirkH420 So you knew the policy, but still didn’t port your number out or cancel?  Totally on you.

ok I guess I need to point something out for you folks......

NOWHERE IN MY POST DID I ASK FOR YOU OPINIONS

NOWHERE IN MY POST DID I REQUEST AN ANSWER. 

AT&T HAS THE WORST CUSTOMER SERVICE IN THE INDUSTRY!!!   <<--- This and only this is the purpose of my joining this discussion.

If you're some kind of AT&T fanboy, more power to you I really [word filter avoidance]. And by the way, I didn't read 3 words of what any of you responded, I just saw It in my email that a group of you fanboys had chimed in. Have a nice life and enjoy getting bent over by AT&T if you haven't left by now.

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@KirkH420 wrote:

NOWHERE IN MY POST DID I ASK FOR YOU OPINIONS

We didn't ask for yours either! But that's the way the cookie internet crumbles   😛

NOWHERE IN MY POST DID I REQUEST AN ANSWER. 

Well... you actually did post a question. A question usually implies an answer...

What can be learned from my experiences?

You might say that was supposed to be rhetorical, but then you gave an explanation that left out that you didn't actually tell them to cancel your account. That kinda blows the rhetorical aspect...

I would like to thank everyone for taking the time to post your comments and opinions related to this subject. While we encourage debates and discussions, we would like it to be carried out in a climate of mutual respect.

The topic has been thoroughly discussed and will now be closed.