Several weeks ago, I posted that AT&T billed me fraudulently for services not requested nor provided, "on behalf of a third party". I had been "crammed". (Phone carriers get a reported approximately 30% kickback on third-party charges, so they don't have much incentive to act on behalf of their customers to resolve these complaints.)

As part of the discussions, AT&T said that they had disabled third party billing for my account, that all third-party charges had been credited, and annotated it that no third party billing was authorized.

This month's bill again has identical fraudulent charges applied. I again called AT&T's service line (888 757 6500) to dispute the charges. This time, the service representative was rude, interrupted me often, told me that these charges were my responsibility, told me to call the same scam operators again, and told me that if I refused to pay these fraudulent charges, AT&T would "hold [me] responsible for them" (whatever she meant by that).

When she "transferred me to a supervisor" after arguing with me about it and telling me that a supervisor "would just tell [me] the same thing", either she or the supervisor hung up on me.

When I called back, I was told after a while that a supervisor wouldn't be available for more than twenty minutes and it was company policy that I couldn't use a support line for more than twenty minutes; that they could only take my number and have a supervisor call me back whenever they got around to it. After I complained that this was not an acceptable policy, and pointed out that I was at this point entirely dissatisfied and researching alternatives for my telephone service, I was finally offered an "account specialist".

The account specialist must have been trained to listen, because he let me tell the whole story, including the fact that I am looking at alternatives for phone service, without interrupting me to explain that I was an idiot. Directly in contradiction to the first customer "support" agent I talked to this morning, he said that credits for the second month of cramming had been applied to my account. He even took the time (unlike both the level one agents) to confirm that third party billing was blocked on my account. Also in direct contradiction to what several of the level one agents told me (both on the first of the month and today) he told me that the third party billing block will block all third party charges, period. In direct contradiction to the previous agent, he said there was no twenty-minute support call rule. He also knocked about $14/month off my phone bill. He didn't even try very hard to sell me DSL service... (He did beg for me to rate my experience with him as "extremely satisfied.")

So I guess I won't go through the trouble of changing phone service quite yet. We'll see how it goes.