I always love when carriers do things like this. Verizon Wireless put a “Notice of Change to Regulatory Charge” in this months bill saying they plan on upping the charge to $0.16 from $0.13 per line each month. The Consumerist is always first to jump on these “Material Changes” to your contract as an opportunity to get out of your cellphone contract without paying an Early Termination Fee. When I first heard about this with text messaging charge increases I didn’t believe it but since then I have seen quite a few people get away with it.
In short you need to stick to your guns when calling Verizon and stating that this extra 3 cents is a “Materially Adverse” change to your contract. If you want to give it a shot you can read up more about the method and details on the Consumerist. A few of the people I know who did this managed to also keep their number by going through this process and not actually cancelling the line but rather having the retention department note their account that the ETF was waived. Then then ported their number off. No promises but you can try to pull that off and port your number to Google Voice…
PS: The thing that really pisses me off about all these fees from wireless carriers is they try to make it sound like it is some sort of government imposed fee or tax when it really is just the carrier trying to squeeze everybody for more money. Tack that on top of Verizon’s horrible new data plan tiers and the world starts looking a bit scary with an AT&T/T-Mobile merger allowing AT&T and Verizon to screw customers left and right.
More on BerryReview
No comments:
Post a Comment