Does Verizon ever make a mistake counting minutes?

Archived from groups: alt.cellular.verizon (More info?)

I went over my 400 minutes as of about 10 days ago and stopped using my
phone on peak hours. It has been at 406 minutes for over a week now.
I have free nights and weekends, so i have been VERY careful to only
use it during then.

In the past day, it jumped from 406 to 423 minutes. I am 100% POSITIVE
that I did not use the phone during peak hours. The earliest I have
used the phone in the past couple of days is 9:45 PM (and night minutes
start at 9:01 PM).

Has anyone encountered this? This makes me nervous, as it just seems
the minutes keep climbing even if i don't use the phone. Unless it is
a poor estimate, or the minutes get added way later (but it sure seems
like they update it within 24 hours of the call you make). Also I
absolutely did not use any peak minutes all last week either, so if
these are minutes that got added later, they would have to be at least
10 days old.

Please advise, as I am very careful about this, and I know I didn't
make any haphazard calls during peak hours. I even checked my phone to
see dialed and received calls and nothing of the sort came up. I'd be
curious to know if anyone else ever had problems with minutes being
added due to some other weird reason.

Thanks!

Archived from groups: alt.cellular.verizon (More info?)

Minutes outside your home area get added later (even if it is a Verizon
system). The delays are longer if it is a different carrier, or a
different Verizon billing area (ie: pre-merger Airtouch vs. GTE vs.
BAM).

I have seen delays of up to a week. They sometimes get charged on a
following month's bill, but Verizon will charge them against the prior
(correct) month's bucket of minutes.

-MVL

Archived from groups: alt.cellular.verizon (More info?)

On Wed, 08 Jun 2005 06:44:05 -0400, Larry W4CSC <noone@home.com>
wrote:

>squarenesswafer@yahoo.com wrote in
>news:1118212285.874397.98360@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com:
>
>> In the past day, it jumped from 406 to 423 minutes.
>
>Dial 611 and report this. Your phone's address may have been hacked and
>someone else is using your account.

Someone hacked his phone for 17 minutes??

Archived from groups: alt.cellular.verizon (More info?)

well i called them, and they told me they can't do anything until the
bill is issued so i gotta wait a week. I know it's only 17 minutes but
it certainly is impossible that I used it because I have only used it
after 9:30 PM in the past 2 weeks. the customer service representative
wasn't able to give any explanation either, in terms of how that may
have happened, so i guess we'll see!

Archived from groups: alt.cellular.verizon (More info?)

Hunter wrote:
> On 7 Jun 2005 23:31:25 -0700, squarenesswafer@yahoo.com wrote:
>
>> The earliest I have
>> used the phone in the past couple of days is 9:45 PM (and night
>> minutes start at 9:01 PM).
>>
>> Has anyone encountered this?
>
> It could be that you were out of your home turf and the charges just
> got to Verizon....or it could be that they are adding peak minutes
> wrongly.
>
> They did it to me once, I stopped using the phone entirely and got
> about 300 more minutes before the month was up.
>
> I kept calling and finally got someone to take the charges off.
>
> I know others it has happened to also.
>
> Hunter

When travelling, it depends on the current local (tower) time, not the time
in your home area. I'm right by the time zone line, and sometimes get a
tower in the pacific time zone even if I am in a mountain time zone area..
Check the time on the front of your phone if you are near a time zone line.

Archived from groups: alt.cellular.verizon (More info?)

Do you use mobile web or Get it Now? I've noticed that those minutes seem
to show up in the #MIN estimate several days late.

<squarenesswafer@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1118212285.874397.98360@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
>I went over my 400 minutes as of about 10 days ago and stopped using my
> phone on peak hours. It has been at 406 minutes for over a week now.
> I have free nights and weekends, so i have been VERY careful to only
> use it during then.
>
> In the past day, it jumped from 406 to 423 minutes. I am 100% POSITIVE
> that I did not use the phone during peak hours. The earliest I have
> used the phone in the past couple of days is 9:45 PM (and night minutes
> start at 9:01 PM).
>
> Has anyone encountered this? This makes me nervous, as it just seems
> the minutes keep climbing even if i don't use the phone. Unless it is
> a poor estimate, or the minutes get added way later (but it sure seems
> like they update it within 24 hours of the call you make). Also I
> absolutely did not use any peak minutes all last week either, so if
> these are minutes that got added later, they would have to be at least
> 10 days old.
>
> Please advise, as I am very careful about this, and I know I didn't
> make any haphazard calls during peak hours. I even checked my phone to
> see dialed and received calls and nothing of the sort came up. I'd be
> curious to know if anyone else ever had problems with minutes being
> added due to some other weird reason.
>
> Thanks!
>

Archived from groups: alt.cellular.verizon (More info?)

On Wed, 08 Jun 2005 20:35:27 -0400, TeddeLI <nospam@nospam.net> wrote:

>>No, they hacked his phone's ADDRESS. DUH.
>>
>So they hacked his phone's address to use 17 minutes??

Yes. The hacker realized he was about to go over his minutes, and he
REALLY needed to make that call.

And if you missed the sarcasm in my post.....
--
To reply, remove TheObvious from my e-mail address.

Archived from groups: alt.cellular.verizon (More info?)

Larry W4CSC wrote:
> squarenesswafer@yahoo.com wrote in
> news:1118212285.874397.98360@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com:
>
>
>>In the past day, it jumped from 406 to 423 minutes.
>
>
> Dial 611 and report this. Your phone's address may have been hacked and
> someone else is using your account.

His phone's "address?" Good one.

I seriously doubt that his phone was cloned. Why? Because as someone
who HAD his phone cloned back in '97, I know the pattern. They are not
interested in piddly 10-20 minute local calls. If someone actually
succeeds in cloning a cell phone, especially these days, then the usage
will be fast and heavy. We're talking 500 to 600 minutes of use in one
day if not more, international LD calls overseas, anything expensive
that they can get away with, as much as they can in the shortest amount
of time before they get caught. The idea behind a cloned phone is that
the person making the clone can then sell time to other unwitting or
unscrupulous folks to call the family in Zimbabwe or Cuba, conduct scam
transactions with associates in Nigeria or eastern europe, or if you
subscribe to W-paranoia, contact an al-Qaeda operative in Afghanistan
for instructions and exchange account information.

Similar activity happened to me when I was on Verizon (then Bell
Atlantic-NYNEX Mobile). My 2-page bill was $35 a month, and I only had
the phone for emergencies, so I never made many calls (cept on weekends
which were free). Then one day, I get a bill from then ... in an large
9x12 envelope, about 50 pages long. The vast majority were calls I
never made to Zimbabwe and South Africa. No real warning, no letter
from Verizon asking "geee... this is an unusual usage pattern... did you
make all these calls?" Nothing but the bill. About 1,600 minutes of
calls made over the course of four days. $3,300, please.... oh and did
we mention we can auto-charge the balance to your Visa every month?

The good news is, as long as you avoid analog, it's way, way harder than
it used to be to clone a cell phone, particularly if it's CDMA or GSM.

--
E-mail fudged to thwart spammers.
Transpose the c's and a's in my e-mail address to reply.

Archived from groups: alt.cellular.verizon (More info?)

On Thu, 09 Jun 2005 19:39:05 -0400, Larry W4CSC <noone@home.com>
wrote:

>Isaiah Beard <sacredpoet@sacredpoet.com> wrote in
>news:11ah9t639q2s014@corp.supernews.com:
>
>> They are not
>> interested in piddly 10-20 minute local calls.
>
>If his phone clone is in, say, Taiwan....how long will it take to show up
>on his bill at home? weeks? months??

I have it on good authority that his phone is cloned in Walmart. But
if that's true then no need to worry because as we all know, Verizon
doesn't work in Walmart.

Archived from groups: alt.cellular.verizon (More info?)

CharlesH <hoch@exemplary.invalid> wrote in
news:GM4re.292$NU5.25@newssvr13.news.prodigy.com:

> When my analog phone with GTE MobileNet (a predecessor to VZW) was
> cloned some years back, the bill showed pretty much nonstop calls for
> around a day or two. In my case, the fraud department caught it and
> called me. They set up a PIN code which I had to dial before making a
> call. When the heavy envelope containing the bill arrived, I just called
> up their security department. They did not bother to try to determine
> which calls were valid; they just wrote them all off. If I had known
> that, I would have made a bunch of calls during that billing cycle...
>
>

I, too, was cloned back in the mid 80's on AMPS. It was so easy to rip
your ESN from the control channel and clone another phone. The fraud
department called to ask if I had taken a trip to California, where the
calls were being placed to exotic places around the planet. Lots of them
were to Mexican numbers in Mexico City, so I'd supposed the hackers were
Mexifornians. It never showed up on my bill and I had to use a PIN to call
from anywhere I was roaming from then on. We were GTE prior to VZW and GTE
bought up our system from Cellular One who took it over from a local
franchisee, Cellular One of Charleston. Ah, those were the days. You
brought your problems to the nice lady at the service desk. She took your
phone (or your car) to the service technicians in the garages and asked you
to wait in the CUSTOMER LOUNGE where you could SIT COMFORTABLY and WATCH
CABLE TV and DRINK FREE COFFEE with DONUTS while you waited. There was a
Coke machine, a carphone on a stalk for customers to use free, A REST ROOM
and nice furniture. Those days are gone now. You STAND for an hour
waiting for the bad news on the hard carpet. There used to be a long table
made for standees to write their checks on near customer service at VZW.
They notice customers were leaning against it to take the pressure off
their legs as they STOOD, so they took the table away....bastards.

Alltel still has a lounge area to sit in if you have to wait. Not as plush
as Cellular One's was, but sure beats STANDING AT VERIZON.... I've never
used it. Almost as soon as you come in the door one of the 8 reps is ready
to help you.....screw up your account..(c;





--
Larry

You know you've had a rough night when you wake up and your outlined in
chalk.

Archived from groups: alt.cellular.verizon (More info?)

Larry W4CSC wrote:

> Ah, those were the days. You
> brought your problems to the nice lady at the service desk. She took your
> phone (or your car) to the service technicians in the garages and asked you
> to wait in the CUSTOMER LOUNGE where you could SIT COMFORTABLY and WATCH
> CABLE TV and DRINK FREE COFFEE with DONUTS while you waited. There was a
> Coke machine, a carphone on a stalk for customers to use free, A REST ROOM
> and nice furniture. Those days are gone now.

Yes, Larry, but you highlight the good and forget the bad. These were
also the days when a phone could cost you $3,000, the highest service
plan you could hope for was a couple of hundred minutes a month for a
hundred dollars or so, there MIGHT be free weekends but no free nights,
long distance wasn't free, there was no such thing as nationwide
coverage and roaming costed an arm and a leg. Mobile to mobile minutes?
Riiiiight. You paid a LOT more and got a LOT less, and to make up for
it, the cell phone companies worked to treat their clientele like
royalty (and most who could afford a cell phone were of the income level
where it was the kind of treatment they were used to anyway).

Now, cell phones are a mass market product. You free cell phone works
in more places, costs less to use, has a longer battery life, and you
could load up the whole family with cell phones if you want. And I
often hope to never HAVE to wait around in a store, so what good are
posh amenities to me if I never want to use them?

And FWIW, there are usually a dozen or so demo phones at a given store;
it's not exactly hard to turn one into a "courtesy phone" if ever you
need to spend some time there.


> You STAND for an hour
> waiting for the bad news on the hard carpet. There used to be a long table
> made for standees to write their checks on near customer service at VZW.
> They notice customers were leaning against it to take the pressure off
> their legs as they STOOD, so they took the table away....bastards.

Who writes checks anymore?




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