Sprint Won’t Fully Refund Me for Overcharges
I have been a Sprint cell phone customer for many years. I recently changed from a "month to month" plan for my service to a 2 year contract. I noticed that I was still being charged $10/month for being on a "month to month" plan. When I complained and asked for the charge to be removed, I received various excuses and promises that a credit had been applied or a credit was coming; always ending with a promise to call me back (never happened) or asking me for patience, etc. Finally, after 5 months of this, I decided to spend an hour or so a day either at the Sprint store, or talking with their customer service people by telephone. No one ever disputed that the charge was in error, or my insistence that I should not be charged. After a couple of days of calls, in each case starting by requesting that the customer service representative call up records of my previous complaints, I was at least consistently getting promises for a retroactive refund of overcharges. Finally, I received an actual credit for a small portion of the overcharges. When I asked why all of the overcharges had not been refunded, I was told that overcharges from more than 60 days in the past were never refunded. I pointed out the records which showed that my requests had long been ignored. I was told that despite recent records of my complaints, my earliest ones were no longer kept. In other words, according to their policy, if they can waste time with false promises and lies, eventually they can "age" the issues to the point where they can deny compensation, because they have successfully ignored the customer for long enough to deny responsibility. The customer service representative had the decency to be ashamed for the position she had to defend, but she could not connect me with anyone who had the authority to authorize refunds for the systematic, deliberate charges for a "service" I never received and Sprint admitted had been an error. At this point, I question whether this was even a genuine error, or simply a policy of billing known, fraudulent charges. Of course, unlike all of the previous historical events, I cannot prove intent, just consistent resistance to remedy an ongoing error.