[Mark] Elliot’s cellphone nightmare began last week when he received a notice from Bank of America saying a payment had bounced on his online bill-pay service. He looked into it and discovered that Verizon was trying to charge him $9,993.88 for his April bill.
….According to the bill, Elliot used his cellphone to upload, download or otherwise access more than 44,000 megabytes worth of data in a single month. That’s the equivalent of downloading about 11,000 songs from iTunes or 60 full-length movies.
[Blah blah….some idiocy from Verizon about how this was all perfectly normal….blah blah]
Elliot woke up Tuesday morning to another notice from BofA saying something was amiss with his account. Turns out Verizon had once again billed his account for the entire $9,993.88 — and this time BofA paid the bill. This resulted in Elliot losing the $781 he had in his checking account and then owing more than $9,200 to the bank.
So I contacted BofA. Tara Burke, a bank spokeswoman, said the way the online bill-pay system works is that if insufficient funds exist in an account, the first two attempts by a business to withdraw funds will be rejected. But if the business tries a third time, the transaction will be processed.
Verizon and BofA eventually fixed this stuff, but only after learning that it was going to be publicized in the LA Times. Without that, this might have gone on forever. And who knows if it’s really over anyway? I wonder if Elliot has checked his credit report yet to see if anyone has put a big fat black mark on it that will take the next five years to clear up?
Anyway, this is why I don’t use electronic bill pay. You have been warned.
