There are so many of us who are disappointed and frustrated by verizons cruel, predatory, and unfair practices when it comes to credit reporting. My wife and I merged accounts in September of 2020 in the midst of COVID as an effort to reduce household costs. We thought we completely closed out her account and had paid the balance in full… that is until we were recently trying to refinance our mortgage in Mid February 2021 and had it come up on a credit report that there was a collections claim by Verizon for $52. They maliciously without proper notification placed my wife account into collections immediately dropping her credit score over 200 points less to around 600 from a rating of over 800 from 1 week prior to this. We learned that apparently after closing the account and thinking we had paid the bill in total and additional charge of $52 was placed on the old account and not transferred over to the current. Despite being fully capable of emailing, texting, and utterly inundating customers with all the latest offers… this same communications company made only the minimal effort to alert us about the outstanding fee which we only learned about through running a credit report. Almost daily they send texts about upgrading service or some other promotion but are unable to contact us about an outstanding bill for 4 months and then destroy a loyal customers credit rating over $52? As many other seem to have had a similar experience we have been trying to sort the matter out over the phone with various representatives who are mostly unknowledgeable and not even able to understand the issue after waiting 20-45 minutes per call just to reach a human being. It’s an impenetrable complication for the customer service reps and the terrible phone system to handle because this is technically a closed account at issue so they all say they can’t even access the record for it. When we are able to escalate the call to a supervisor they have switched us directly to the collections agency which is not the one who has any ability to remove this mark from the credit report, it was put there by verizon and can only be removed by verizon. The bill has now been paid… we have been told it may take weeks or even up to 90 days for verizon to even notify the credit agencies of payment which still leaves a huge ding in our credit report for the next 7 years as an account that was put in collections and paid. We have been customers of verizon paying bills on time for over a decade each, for verizon to be this disrespectful and abusive to customers is outrageous. This will potentially cost us and other customers thousands of dollars in the future because this company is so callous and malicious. It’s nearly impossible to reach an appropriate supervisor or manager on what they call the “Recovery” team (800-852-1922) to even discuss the issue with unless you have unlimited time to call and be on hold… and call back when you are disconnected or routed countless times to the wrong department into an endless loop of poor customer service and lengthy holds. We have now had half a dozen representative conversations in which we were told a “manager” will call back within 24-48… not a single call back has happened yet. Now looking into what steps we can take in bringing this to the BBB and New York State Consumer Protections Bureau.
