My spouse and I signed up for a 3 year contract & purchased 2 Blackberry phones at the beginning of 2010. For the first month, things seemed to be ok. Little did we know the fiasco was just about to start.
The problem began when I started noticing charges on both of our bills for game downloads which we never made, in addition to download fees. I immediately called Rogers, explained to them the problem, was assured this wouldn't happen again and was given a credit towards out bill. Liars. It happened again the next month. And the month after that. As a matter of fact, it continued to happen for an entire year. Every month, without fail, I would check our bills and the EXACT same charges were there, for the exact same amount. Every month for a year straight I called in to complain, was put on hold, shuffled from customer service reps to their tech support department, back to their customer service reps when their tech support department told me they couldn't do anything about it. Every time I called it took at least an hour and a half to get the charged removed, sometimes in excess of 2 hours. I would often be put on hold for so long that I would fall asleep with the speaker phone on and eventually give up and hang up, just to have to call again the next day. Then it would inevitably happen again. Spending hours on the phone every month arguing with them to fix THEIR screw-ups seriously began to wear on me and stress me out.
During that year of constant fraudulent charges, we also had them cut off our service even though we were paying our bill and were well below the credit limit they set for our account. When I called in and asked them what was going on, they said that even though we were under our credit limit, we were 'close to it', which is why we were cut off. They then said we would have to pay a reconnection fee of $50 for each phone. WHAT?!? I have never seen or heard of any company operating like this. In actual fact, we were nearly $200 below our credit limit set on our account. Well below the $300 limit they had set. Scam artists. But, like most other people who are on contract with Rogers or any other Canadian services provider, I thought 'we're on contract, we have no choice but to pay the reconnection fee because if we don't get them reconnected, they will continue to bill us while we are not even able to use the phones'. A complete and total scam pulled by Rogers to steal more money from their customers. They use their contracts to thieve money from people. Paying the reconnection fee was a big mistake on our part. We should have refused and cut our services right then and there.
Then it finally happened. The last time I called them to get the exact same charges removed from both of our bills PLUS a charge for going over our data cap - which was impossible because we monitored our data using data counters on both of our phones - they told me that the extra charges were there for a reason, they just didn't happen by themselves, tried to say that somebody else must be using our phones, tried to blame it on our kids - of which we have none; nobody else has access to our phones - and every other reason they could come up with to NOT remove the charges. I simply couldn't take it anymore. I told them that if they didn't remove the fraudulent charges, we would cut our services contract with them as they were not living up to their end of the contract. The way I saw it is we were going to wind up paying a great deal of money over the 2 remaining years of our contract for bogus charges they would continue to tack onto our bill. I was not prepared to go through that or the stress of calling them every month for another 2 years arguing with them about the fraudulent charges. They then began to threaten me with ruining my credit, saying that they would be sending us a huge bill for cutting our contract short & if we didn't pay they would go after us with collection agencies, etc. That was the last straw. I told them cut off services to BOTH phones immediately & that they cound do whatever they wanted because we were not going to pay the fraudulent charges and we were not going to pay them anything more at all, regardless of collection agencies, etc. I then hung up. That one call took a total of over 2 hours, being bounced from department to department, including their 'retentions' department. Funny, if they wanted to retain us as customers, they sure didn't show it.
10 minutes later they were calling back from their retentions department, offering us all sorts of 'special' deals. After a year of wasting countless hours with their incompetent, dishonest customer service reps, being beyond stressed out to the point of feeling physically ill (I am also dealing with a very serious physical illness which is very much affected by stress) there was no way on god's green earth I was about to continue doing so for another 2 years and then battle to get out of the contract. No way. When they realized that there was zero chance of talking me into what they were proposing, the threats began again. I simply hung up and waited for the harassing mails and phone calls to start from the collections agency they use. Which they did.
To date, I have received letters threatening legal action if we don't contact the collection agency and pay the close to $1500 they claim we owe Rogers. I absolutely refuse to call. I have already wasted an entire year arguing with Rogers, I am not about to do it with the collection agency. They have also tried calling with their threats. I simply hang up. We have found an excellent alternate cellular service provider which has none of these problems and which we are very happy with. This has demonstrated even more how shoddy Rogers services are.
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