Is there any way to contact verizon with a detailed cell phone technical support question?

[okID]

Is there any way to contact Verizon with a detailed cell phone technical support question?  I prefer e-mail so as to provide details (like I am trying to provide here).  I have tried in-store personnel (no help at all) and the web chat - they just want to see me more data instead of helping me with my basic problem!

I CAN NOT GET ANYONE FROM VERIZON TO GIVE ME ANY HELP NOR CAN I FIND A WAY TO FILE A COMPLAINT.  AT THIS POINT I JUST WANT TO DROP MY VERIZON ACCOUNT BUT I'M SURE THAT IT WILL COST ME A SMALL FORTUNE TO GET OUT OF IT.

Here is my issue:

Chat transcript removed as required by the

BELOW IS A SCREEN COPY FROM REDDIT ABOUT SOMEONE WITH THE SAME PROBLEM WITH A VERIZON CELL PHONE

So last night my RAZR MAXX HD did something totally bewildering by spontaneously downloading 2.6 GB of data over the course of ~ 3 hours. Fortunately I was able to catch this problem before it ended up being really expensive, but I still exceeded my 2 GB data plan by 600MB.

The Culprits:

• Reddit News Free: 160 MB foreground / 0.96 GB background
• Android OS: 0 MB foreground / 1.18 GB background
• Several unnamed applications: ~ 350 MB

Screenshots:

• The massive data spike
• Android OS data usage
• Reddit News Free data usage
• Weird unnamed processes

Detailed timeline:

• 5:12 PM: Incident begins according to VZW data usage website (2.60410 GB used). This is around the last time that I used my phone at the laundromat before getting dinner and watching Game of Thrones.
• 8:04 PM: 50% of data allowance used (txt msg)
• 8:31 PM: 75% of data allowance used (txt msg)
• 8:58 PM: 90% of data allowance used (txt msg)
• 9:13 PM: 100% of data allowance used (txt msg)
• 10:05 PM: Got the text messages and immediately put the phone into airplane mode
• 10:30 PM: Took screenshots
• 10:45 PM: Enabled wifi, installed Kaspersky premium. Scan returned no threats.
• 11:00 PM: Left phone in airplane mode, went to sleep.

The questions:

• What was the root cause of this issue? Did Reddit News freak out as a result of an esoteric bug or was my phone hacked?
• If this was a simple Reddit News bug, then why was the Android OS also trying to use such a massive amount of background data?
• What the hell are these unnamed numeric applications? I've inspected my process history and this is the first time they have ever attempted to use data.

I'm pretty sure that I can explain this situation to Verizon and get out of having to pay additional data usage fees, but I would like to know more about the problem before I get in touch with them.

all 13 comments

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[–]omgmrjmako/PA, deb/Carbon 3 points 1 year ago*

All I can think is your phone may have background downloaded an OTA update, and you'd then be prompted with something like, "As update to your Android system has been downloaded, would you like to install it now?"

I do find it very odd that the update would be 2.6GB. As a rough base, the CyanogenMod 10.1 firmware for your device is well under 200MB, so unless Verizon has a shit-ton of bloatware in the update, or it had to attempt to download multiple times for some reason, it may be a stretch.

But doing a little homework, it looks like the Verizon Razr Maxx was updated to 4.1 in late March. Maybe they're still rolling it out in waves? Have you gotten the update yet?

Edit: Aaaand I just noticed you appear to be running an AOSP-based ROM, which totally rules out a carrier update being sent out.

Edit2: If you want to live dangerously, you could try running:

#kill -9 12289 

That 12289 is the PID listed in your screenshot. But don't run that without fulling understanding the kill command.

The ps command could also be of use, but probably not.

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[–]lechnito[S] 2 points 1 year ago

I can confirm that the phone is currently at 4.1.2 and that I wasn't prompted for an OTA update.The fact that both the Android OS and Reddit News processes were simultaneously using an extremely large amount of data is unlikely to be a coincidence...

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[–]omgmrjmako/PA, deb/Carbon 3 points 1 year ago

That is very curious that the spikes happened at the same time.I'm curious. It may have put at least some of that 2.6GB somewhere. You could use a data visualizer tool to see if you can find it, which may lead to more clues.

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[–]lechnito[S] 2 points 1 year ago

The largest directories are:

• DCIM: Normal looking photos (90,825 KB)
• Android: Primarily map cache data (64,846 KB)

If it was downloading content then it did not significantly save content to storage. It's not like I have anything particularly sensitive on the phone, but the idea that it was uploading a snapshot of my data definitely makes me uncomfortable.

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[–]omgmrjmako/PA, deb/Carbon 2 points 1 year ago

Yup, Digital Camera IMages and videos.Somewhere in /sdcard/Android would be my guess as to where a mysterious file would be downloaded, but if it's only 64MB, and mostly map data, I'd safely rule it out.I'm sorry, but I'm stumped here.Edit: I should mention I don't think this is malware, because unless a malicious app gained superuser access, any data it used would show under it's own apk in the data usage list, not Android OS.

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[–]mistrbrownstone 0 points 1 year ago

DCIM: Normal looking photos (90,825 KB)

Was it trying to auto-upload pictures or video to G+?I fucking hate that.

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[–]lechnito[S] 1 point 1 year ago

Although I'm not really up to speed with the Android platform, I come from a UNIX background so I feel comfortable running commands. How do I pull up a bash terminal? Do I need to root the phone first?

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[–]omgmrjmako/PA, deb/Carbon 2 points 1 year ago

There's a number of terminal emulators in the Play Store that work well. You don't need a rooted phone to get to the shell as your user, but any privileged command won't execute unless you can grant it permission from the Superuser app that is installed when you root the device. So you could probably do a ps -e, but not a kill -9.

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[–]lechnito[S] 1 point 1 year ago

Got it. I downloaded a terminal emulator but unfortunately those processes no longer exist.Does Android keep a generic log of system level events like /var/log/syslog?

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[–]omgmrjmako/PA, deb/Carbon 2 points 1 year ago

I don't think so, and I know you'd need superuser permission to read most of the files in /var/log anyway. I'm not super familiar with how Android does its logging, but I do know that the two files of interest are the logcat and dmesg.

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[–]sh0nuff 1 point 1 year ago

Want to mention here that using your settings to set your data cap (set it on your billing day), then you won't go over again.Those text messages are really unhelpful, as they send out well after the data has been used. Chances are good you hit close to the 2GB mark before you received the bulk of the messages.

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[–]kindofabuzz -4 points 1 year ago

Quit installing pirated apps.

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[–]lechnito[S] 1 point 1 year ago

That's definitely not the case here; both my PC and and Android phone are free from pirated apps.

[zellerandy]

You used the data.  Verizon can not see what it was sued for.  However your phone can see whats apps used the data.  go to settings-data usage- there will be a place that says data usage cycle.  line the dates up with your cycle.  then there will be a bar graph below that   extend bother white bars one all the way to the left and one all the way to the right.  after those are extended below that will be a list of apps,  there should be one that used over 2 gb and that will show you what app used that data in her purse