[afrombie]

Logged into my online banking tonight to find a nice pending transaction for $2840.00 Immediately I figured someone had stolen my debit card number but then I looked at the transaction item and it said 'Cingular Support'.

So I quickly logged into my Cingular online account and about fainted. It stated I had 2840$ in current chares.

A little history...11/2005 I switched from Sprint to Cingular and grabbed a RAZR phone. In the last week of 12/2005 I went to the local Cingular store here in Orange County and added an 8700c with unlimted BB. I also had upgraded my entire plan so that I had 1500 minutes, BB Unlimited, and 2 lines costing about 110$ a month.

I have been using email on the BB (no BES) and also using the Internet Browser (not Cingular one ever) to read Digg, CNN, etc every once in a while. I also downloaded GoogleLocal Maps and have used it a few times.

On my bill for the BB phone it shows:

INTERNET XPRESS - 215,967 Msg/KB Used @ 0.01 bill rate

When I bought the BB at the Cingular store the manager stated that all email and Internet browsing was included.

Now my bill is 2400$ - this is crazy. My wife is on TMob with a Sidekick2 and has full internet/email for 20$ a month addon.

Its too late to call customer service now (almost 1AM here) but what should I do / who should I call @ Cingular (billing or data support?) or should I go to the Cingular store that sold me the BB???

Bottom line is I am not paying $2400 - that is just ridiculous.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[tfaz1]

Ouch. My suggestion is that you take a breath and try to stay calm until you talk to Cingular. I have to think they will give you a pass on this one, considering that you are new to them and the BB service. I've heard horror stories about their "unlimited" BB service, but this one takes the cake.

Sorry to say this now, but I sure am glad I hacked my 8700c and put it on T-Mo's $20 *true* unlimited BB service.

[bobhammer]

I suggest you have a serious talk with cingular and tell them your case, and tell them your stances which you definitely wont pay that $2400, I am sure they will deal with your bill! and make it more reasonible!

[lgreenberg]

Wow, here we go again. I'll be interested in seeing how this turns out.

I'm wondering if this is a Razr problem? Do you have another internet plan on your account for the Razr or only the unlimited Blackberry plan?

My guess is since the Blackberry plan only covers the Blackberry they threw WIX Pay Per Use on to your account so you could access the web on your Razr. However, when ever you used the wap APN on your Blackberry it defaulted to WIX and billed you.

Let us know what happens. I would think they'd remove the charges.

[Dawg]

DING DING DING we have a winner on the getting really screwed award. Man just try to remain calm and talk to the highest ranking cincuglar rep you can find. They will surely take care of you.

[stealthx32]

Shoulda gotten a plan w/ your wife. We pay T-Mobile $150/month for 4 lines + BIS on 2 of 'em...2000 minutes shared.

[kregars]

ATT/Cingular customer service is HORRIBLE. 2 years ago when I had them in SE PA I had a Siemens S46 (because it had both digital and analog capabilities). They took down the tower that fed their analog thus cutting me off at home. I called and canceled the phone leaving only one phone on the account. Then when I moved to MD, I changed carriers as I found that Cingulars service where I am was horrible (think standing outside with one leg lifted and 1 arm straight out in order to JUST BARELY get that 1 bar of service). That was november 05. I called, canceled and got the persons name. LAST NIGHT (4pm) I get a call from their collections dept noting I owed them $$$ or they were going to cut off my service. When I told them that I had canceled my account they threatened to turn my account over to a collection agency and that it would negatively impact my credit rating. I have filed a grievance with phone records of my call as well as names of ppl AND the credit for my account as I was auto paying the account to them from my bank. Waiting to hear back from someone this AM. Lukily after my experience in PA I learned to take down all names, etc of who I talked to and that Vonage records the number called, time on call etc.

In any case..good luck with Cingular CS...and if they deny helping you out good luck getting ahold of anyone.

[lgreenberg]

It's not fair to single out Cingular for having poor customer service.

Show me any wireless carrier that has good customer service. They all stink.

[nb_mitch]

The sad part here is you found this on your bank account, after it had already been posted, so if it clears your bank and Cingular eventually gives you a credit, it may take years to work the credit off :(

You need to call, it just sounds like someone really screwed up, unless the browsing you are doing is on the RAZR instead of the BB. All browsing and email are included on the BB plan, regardless of which browser you use. They might try and charge you for the Google Local access, but at this point I wouldn't even mention it.

ps. why not single out Cingular? I haven't heard problems like this (data charges) about any other US carrier in the 8 months I have been on the forum. Now when it comes to calling a Cingular C/S for help, they generally are very nice and helpful, just clueless

[lgreenberg]

Originally Posted by nb_mitch

Now when it comes to calling a Cingular C/S for help, they generally are very nice and helpful, just clueless

Well, yeah that was my point. I guess I wasn't clear.

Absolutely it's okay to single out Cingular for the extra charges. It's a joke.

What I don't think is fair is to say Cingular is the only carrier with poor customer service. I've had service with them all (Cingular, AT&T,Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, Nextel) and generally have found the customer service department's from all of them to be equally clueless.

[mortgageguy]

Originally Posted by lgreenberg

Well, yeah that was my point. I guess I wasn't clear.

Absolutely it's okay to single out Cingular for the extra charges. It's a joke.

What I don't think is fair is to say Cingular is the only carrier with poor customer service. I've had service with them all (Cingular, AT&T,Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, Nextel) and generally have found the customer service department's from all of them to be equally clueless.

I have had service with them all too(except T-Mobile) and have found them to be misinformed most of the time. They can generally handle the simple tasks bust are not trained adequately on the smartphones and data packages.

[afrombie]

First of all - thank you to everyone for their help and support - I really appreciate it.

So I just got off the phone with Cingular billing support.

First of all I will say that the cust.service rep was very nice and slightly shocked when she looked at my bill (although she told me later that recently she saw someone with the same problem with $15,000 worth of data charges.)

Apparently what happened is the Cingular store who setup my account never removed the Internet Pay-per-use line item on my account when I added the BB (was on my acct due to the RAZR phone). So every data transfer in the last month was getting billed @ 0.01 a kb....lovely.

So the cust.service rep put me hold for 5 min to get this cleared up and came back and said that the credit amount was so big no one in her facility could handle the credit. She stated that the "3rd level" of billing management had to process this credit and she would have to fill out a form and submit it to them.

Apparently this "3rd level of billing management" is supposed to call me within 48hours and let me know that the credit is being applied, and then forward me to financial services division and work out a way to post the money back into my bank account.

3 Questions for Cingular:

1) Why does their system allow for Internet Pay Per Use and BB Unlimited on a BB phone number? As a software developer this would seem to be a no brainer and easy to flag automatically.

2) Since the cust.service rep told me that she sees this problem all the time when people add BBs; why doesnt Cingular issue an internal service bulletin to all their sales reps and stores stating that they need to remove Internet PPU if the customer adds a BB with unlimited?

3) Cingular's billing software should analyze all their accounts with a tolerance level and if someone's current bill is for example, +/- 300% of their average monthly account balance then that account should be flagged to be looked at. This way it could save on a lot of pissed off and irate customers.

The problem is that Cingular assumes that all their employees who setup these phones are perfect and instead of adding a preventative safety check (one or more of the suggestions above) they would rather deal with irate customers *after the problem occurs*.

This is a definitely a lesson in the evils of "autopay" services. To save time I put most of my bills on automatic debit from a checking acct or credit card. You can be rest assured I will always check the e-bill ahead of time.

To anyone $2400 is a blow - luckily for me I can wait 30-45 days for the credit to be posted back (although I will demand it posted back immediately and also demand some sort of future account credit/service upgrade etc) to my bank account. But I could imagine someone else having their entire checking account wiped out clean and having nothing for 30 - 45 days, that would be horrible.

btw...I switched from Sprint to Cingular to get away from bad customer service and despite the fact that the cust.service rep was nice, I am totally soured on Cingular and would switch to TMob ... if only there coverage wasnt so crappy here (and I know..my wife has Tmob).

[SDCABBFAN]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) BlackBerry8700/4.1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/102)

There are a lot of things at cingular that do not make sense at all. You can't have int'l bb and their discounted roaming or long distance. Its not because they don't want to allow it. Its because the system we use for billing won't allow it. And because chain of command is so screwed up here there is no one to go to in order to fix this. We bought at&t wireless for 42 billion but they took over as management marketing and policy makers. In essence the managment that failed is now running cingular.

[jjessen]

This is a good example of why I make "one-time" on-line payments to Cingular. I look at the bill, make sure I agree with it, then pay. Next month, same thing.

[mas90guru]

Yeah, never allow them to automatically pull money out of your account for the bill. That's a recipe for disaster.

[phonemonkey]

Originally Posted by SDCABBFAN

[SIZE=1]
There are a lot of things at cingular that do not make sense at all. You can't have int'l bb and their discounted roaming or long distance. Its not because they don't want to allow it. Its because the system we use for billing won't allow it.

Could you explain this a bit more? Are you saying you can't have an 8700c with the $3.99 discount international LD plan and discount $5.99 international roaming?

[tfaz1]

Originally Posted by lgreenberg

Well, yeah that was my point. I guess I wasn't clear.

Absolutely it's okay to single out Cingular for the extra charges. It's a joke.

What I don't think is fair is to say Cingular is the only carrier with poor customer service. I've had service with them all (Cingular, AT&T,Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, Nextel) and generally have found the customer service department's from all of them to be equally clueless.

Equally clueless, perhaps. But T-Mobile has always had a can-do attitude when it comes to solving my problems. That's more than I can say for Sprint or ATT/Cingular. YMMV...

[DuckWingDuck]

tfaz1 - Exactly. While TMO level 1 customer service reps have always been fairly clueless, they have been helpful and have always forwarded me to the next level (really, I should just have a direct line into AWG), I used to be with Sprint and custoemr service over there are just horrendous.

afrombie - Where in Orange County are you? While I agree that TMO service isn't the greatest, there have been tremendous strides in the past six to twelve months in terms of coverage and it's significantly better than it used to be (been with TMO since they changed their name from Voicestream and started offering service in California). And their rates are such that the occasionally reception problem I'm okay with!

[WMurray]

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry8700/4.1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/102)

I'll be anxious to hear how quickly Lvl 3 resolves this. I ran into the same situation in Dec 04. Added Media works unlimited to my Razr and somehow ended up with the "Wix Pay per Use" code on my acct. My Jan statement had me billed for $403.00 of wix usage (thankfully I was just using WAP from the Razr). After over 9 months of repeatedly disputing the charges and having my service interrupted for the past due balance, I finally received my credit in Oct 05. One rep actually told me that the process would probably escalate more quickly if I would pay the total due so that my acct didn't show past due.

[stripesace]

You guys have me worried about my bill. I exchanged my phone within the 30 days, returned accesories, etc. and walked out of the store only paying .56 for the difference. Apparantly they're not going to pro-rate my plan, which is FINE BY ME because it was in the middle of a billing cycle, besides, how can you pro-rate an UNLIMTED USAGE line item? right now my next bill is supposed to be 117. for the BB unlimited and 450 nation w/ rollover. I also opted for 200 text, and N/W starting at 7 for 7 dollars so

40 for the min
45 for the blackberry
7 for the n/w at 7
3 for the tex
3 for roadside (need to get rid of that- AAA)

And because all i did was add a BB Unlim, my store rep said they wouldn't pro-rate me and drive my bill up higher. So we'll see what happens after the weekend.