By:
CLEVELAND, Ohio – The $9,100 Verizon cellphone bill staggered and stumped Valarie Gerbus, causing a financial hit that could destroy her credit.
For months, the mother of two from suburban Tampa paid $118 a month for her cellphone package that included 4 gigabytes of data, which she says she never exceeded. That changed last month when Verizon charged her with using an eye-gouging 569 gigabytes for a whopping $8,535.
The company tacked on $600 when she dropped the plan. Gerbus said she refuses to pay the bill, saying she never used that much data. She said she asked the company repeatedly how the bill soared.
She has yet to get an answer.
“I told them that I won’t pay the bill,” Gerbus said. “I can either wait until they take it to a collection agency or when they take it to court. Either way, my credit history will be ruined. I can go bankrupt here.”
Gerbus’ last bill from Verizon is a consumer’s horror story that stands out, based on its outrageous spike. But across the country, thousands of cellphone users reported soaring data usages and hefty over-limit fees. The complaints began multiplying after The Plain Dealer reported Friday how the company has billed customers for jumps in data fees. Many customers, however, say they have done nothing different as far as their usage.
In interviews last week, Verizon officials insisted their corporate office wasn’t aware of any widespread problem. The officials said the company is looking into a few concerns, such as data use on customer accounts in the middle of the night, and some of the more extreme cases of people who have contacted the newspaper.
Like Gerbus, many of the customers were stunned with charges for data that they say they never touched. A grandmother in Rapid City, South Dakota, said she and her family fly through a month’s supply of 15 gigabytes in 10 to 12 days at a charge of $300. They struggle for the rest of the month, she said.
“I thought it was just me until I read your story,” said the woman, who declined to be identified. “Then I realized, ‘Hey, there might be something to this.”’
Tom Walker of Lockport, New York, saw his family’s data climb, even though he, his wife and daughter were doing nothing differently.
“It got to the point that we were battling in our family,” Walker said. “We were really asking each other, ‘Have you been on Facebook too much? What have you been doing?’ We were trying to figure out who was using all this data.”
That’s something Gerbus would like to know.
She said she had been with Verizon since February. Gerbus, who is in real estate, said she needed her Samsung Note 5 for work and to keep up with her two children. Gerbus bought the phone when she started her plan with Verizon.
She said she never went over 4 gigs a month. She said she listens to Pandora, but the software and usage for work never took up more than a 0.5 gigabyte of data.
Each month, she paid $118.
That changed in July. She said she was scheduled to go to a wedding that was out of town and feared there would not be Wi-Fi on the trip. She said she often had plenty of unused data, and she didn’t think of needing more.
On July 21, Verizon sent her a text, notifying her that she had used nearly all of her 4 gigabytes of data. The text said she could get 4 more gigabytes for $20. Realizing that she had two weeks before the end of the month, Gerbus bought the additional data.
Within an hour of the purchase, she received another text that told her she only had 10 percent left on the data that she had just purchased. The next text message she received said she could change her plan to 8 gigabytes for an additional $20 a month. She said she bought that upgrade to ensure she didn’t have any data overages.
In a span of several hours, she estimates that she received 40 to 50 texts saying that she needed to purchase more data. She turned the notification off, believing that there had been a glitch in Verizon’s system.
Gerbus said she realizes now that she should have contacted the company at that point, but she didn’t, as she feared being placed on hold by a customer service representative.
She later went to work and planned on paying the bill online. When she found her online statement, it said she owed $6,480 for using 490 gigabytes of data. She was shocked.
“I was only expecting to see the $118 bill that I have faithfully paid (for months),” she said.
A tech support employee for Verizon told her that her phone had hit on Amazon more than 400 times in a span of days, she said. On Aug. 1, she begged a customer service representative to avoid turning her phone off, as she needed it for her job and for her children to reach her. The company said she had used 490 gigabytes of data since July 21.
The next day, the company turned off her phone, claiming her usage had jumped to 569 gigabytes.
“I told them that there was no way that I could have gone from 490 to 560 in a day,” Gerbus said. “The person said, ‘Yes there is.’ ”
She left the carrier for T-Mobile. For leaving Verizon’s contract, she owes a $600 cancellation fee. She said she would gladly pay that.
But she has a lot of questions for the company. The main one is simple: How does a customer go from paying $118 a month for 4 gigabytes of data to a bill that includes 569 gigabytes and will end up costing her $9,153?
She said she has tried to determine where her data went by using an online account analysis. But each time she does, she gets a message: “The activity you are trying to perform is currently unavailable. Please try again later.”
She said she plans to file a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission.
“I understand that it is a big company and it cannot call everyone who appears to be going over his or her usage,” Gerbus said. “But I had never gone over my amount of 4 gigs. And then to get a bill that high makes you wonder.”
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