mysmstxt

So I have been really really close with the folks at Verizon Wireless these days.

When I first started out with a phone, I got mine through Capitol One, my credit card company.  Why? I don’t know, they offered one to me and I took them up on it.  They were soon bought out, and I was suddenly a Sprint customer.  I was with them for a handful of years until I was looking at doing a family plan with my now ex…  He at the time was with T-Mobile. We were both at a month by month contract, so we figured we’d see if T-Mobile or Sprint would get us the better deal and a new rzr phone. In both cases, both companies would give the person who has been with them would get a free phone, but not the person joining… Neither would budge. So, we left our companies and joined the Verizon network…this worked out well as his family lived in GA, and neither of our phones worked when going to visit them.  Verizon worked EVERYWHERE!!  PLUS, we both got a free phone! 

I remember having Sprint and having sooo many problems.. my phone randomly turning off and not turning on, weird ‘syntax’ errors… and they wouldn’t help me at all.  I’d go in stand in line for a half an hour to tell them what was wrong and they’d tell me there was not a thing they could do about it unless it happened while I was in the office.  It was so frustrating…

Anyway, it’s been awesome since I’ve moved to Verizon. No problems. Until recently.  I’ve had spotty problems using my internet on the phone… it’s just been for a few hours at a time… It’s annoying, but something I can live with.  I called them both times, and both times they said they were aware of the problem, it’s an outage.  The more recent time I called them I asked why it was my bill went down by $10 recently.

In October I got a new phone. With this phone I had to get a data package, something I haven’t had to do in the past.  Getting my next bill, I saw the data package listed there.  I was now paying $90 per month.  Suddenly in February my bill went down $10. I kept meaning to call and ask what was up, and just never did, until I called about these outages I’ve been having.  They told me that I had opted in to some premium texting.  I said no, no I didn’t… They told me that it is something that I could automatically be opted in for, not knowing.  Having gone paperless, I wasn’t reading my online bill so close as to scroll all the way to the bottom (after all the listed calls for the month)where it said something about mytxtsms.com $9.99…. It was totally hidden waaaaay down there.  After thinking about it I do remember getting weird random texts, after each time I’d text STOP, hoping they’d stop coming. FINALLY it worked, which must be when they stopped charging me $9.99. 

Verizon was super nice about it, they are crediting my account for 2 months… not the entire 4 months that I was charged, but it’s nice they are doing SOMETHING for me…

I just don’t get how this can be legal… how can someone be auto opted into something that will cost them $9.99  a month?! I was a little annoyed at Verizon too for it to be SO hidden within my bill. I’ll be doing some more investigation into this to see if I can’t get all my money back… we will see what happens.