Dealing w Fraud; advice needed (credit, insurance, pay, vs)

[Jill_Schramm]

There has been serious fraudulent activity on our AT&T accounts. Someone bought 2 cell phones and charged them to our account. We spent a long time dealing with this a couple of weeks ago and the AT&T fraud department eventually resolved it in our favor.

Flash forward to today. We receive our bill and it is even worse. Now there are 4 new iPhones that have been purchased on our account and our bill is over $400. (It is usually $120 or less).

WTF? This was supposedly resolved in our favor. And we have an email to that effect. Or maybe it was and then there was new fraudulent activity?

Questions: This bill is due tomorrow and we do not want to pay it, at least we do not want to pay the fraudulent part of it. And yet I am concerned that if we don’t pay, we may have even more problems. Is it possible to pay under protest or only pay our part, the legitimate part of this bill?

Also, what should we do?

We have already made about 15 calls to AT&T, but we can’t speak to anyone who will actually help us with our problem. We are always directed to the fraud department and have never been able to actually speak with a person in that department. And, as I said, we received email confirmation (from the fraud department) that our problem has been taken care of and it has not been.

We have been trying to call again, but are just getting exactly the same thing as last time: “You can’t speak to anyone in the fraud department. You need to fill out this form!” So we filled out the same form again.

What to do? I feel like we are just going in circles with AT&T. And we absolutely do not want to pay $400/month … or potentially more if these scammers keep buying iPhones and charging them to our account.

[Parnassia]

What are the posting dates of these "new" phones/charges? Maybe the dates crossed over more than one billing cycle which is why you're just now seeing them on your bill. If they really are "new" and were posted after the previous ones were resolved, maybe the best thing to do is close your entire AT&T account (which would hopefully disable all the information thieves would need to defraud you) and start over again with a different carrier.

[1200RT]

I never pay for charges that are not my businesses. Do you have a business account rep? With Verizon, we have a dedicated 'person' we can speak to. As Parnassia suggested, the best route may be to close the account and start over.

[Jill_Schramm]

Thanks. I think I posted in the wrong forum. I thought this was for dealing w businesses not business owners? But maybe it’s for business owners?

We are figuring it out slowly. I’ve spent the last hour or so on the phone w AT&T, but I least have someone who seems to be making progress.

It seems that there are multiple issues. First, we were credited for the fraud, but it hasn’t appeared in our statement yet. However, it also turns out that they didn’t do such a thorough job of crediting. The fraudsters not only added a line and bought devices, but they also changed our service — the service on our lines to be the most expensive possible (unlimited w tons of extra insurance), so the AT&T people are trying to switch us back to our original cheap plan ($40/month per line vs. $120/month per line). Unfortunately, they no longer offer the cheap plan we had before we were switched, so they are trying to figure out what to do …