I'm positive that Verizon is committing Fraud.
10 days ago my husband and I switched from Sprint to Verizon and got new Galaxy S5 phones. While with Sprint, my husband used about 1.5GB of data a month and I used .5GB a month. The reason my usage was less was because I use my phone less (duh) but also because my phone very often wouldn't connect to their service, 3G or their so called 4G at all. My husband didn't have this problem, but I got so fed up with the connectivity that we switched to Verizon. We thought that since I would be able to use my phone a little more and the data would be faster and more reliable, it would be prudent to buy 3GB of data a month even though we were only averaging 2GB before.
Well, after having Verizon for 10 days, we have used 2.3GB between the two of us; .5GB for me and 1.8GB for my husband. In other words, our data usage has MORE THAN TRIPLED with Verizon. This is absolutely wrong, so I did some investigating. I looked at the data usage details spreadsheet that Verizon posts online with the date, time and amount of each occurrence of data usage. Be aware that we have wifi at home (where we are basically every night from 7pm-7am) and my husband has wifi at work (weekdays 8am-5pm). I was SHOCKED to see that the vast majority of my husbands outrageous usage was being incurred specifically during times when he was at work or home, even significant amounts at 2 and 3 o'clock in the morning. Only a little usage was being accrued during the about 3 hours a day when he might not be connected to wifi.
I spent over an hour on the phone today (including 40 minutes on hold) with tech support. They must have thought I was an idiot because they kept telling me about how our phones are using a lot of RAM. I'm no IT expert, but RAM is internal memory and not equivalent to data usage. Then they tried to tell me that the time stamps on our spreadsheets were delayed and that the data was really being used when not on wifi but not showing up on my account until some unknown period of time later. This is bullshit and I debunked that theory by turning off my data (when there actually was no usage accrued) and then turned my data back on momentarily at 10:15am. A usage charge popped up a little while later on my account time stamped 10:16am. Pretty accurate, which tells me that the other time stamps are also accurate to within a minute or two; not off by many hours.
Then tech support told me to try a test to see if I can show that data is being accrued when I'm definitely not using it. They told me to turn off my data for an extended period of time, use wifi only, and then check my account to see if data charges are accruing. Well, of course data isn't accruing when data is off. That proves nothing. That does not have any bearing whatsoever on the fact that data usage is accruing when data service is ON but I'm CONNECTED to a reliable, strong, functioning WIFI signal like the one at my home and the one in my husband's office. There are only two explanations left. Either my husband and I are severely psyciatrically disabled and are imagining having working wifi signals and are somehow watching youtube videos in our sleep; OR VERIZON IS COMMITTING FRAUD. Its one or the other, the way I see it.
IS THERE A REASONABLE SOLUTION TO THIS??? Resolving this issue by telling me to manually turn my data service on and off each time I come and go from my house is unacceptable. Verizon, you need to fix your practices and remove the fraudulent usage from my account immediately. Since I'm sure you won't, I'll be switching to AT&T since I still have 3 days to cancel my contract. Third time is a charm, I hope.
