Bye Bye Bell! – Part 6
I came home today to another Bell Canada bill. I was prepared to go ballistic as they already billed us for our last month as I mentioned previously after we moved to Teksavvy Home Phone. So I opened it and found some good news and some bad news:
- The good news is that Bell Canada credited our account $37.28 for the period after March 29th.
- The bad news is that Bell Canada billed us $15.38 for a “Home Phone Deactivation Charge”
The scumbags.
My wife is going to call them to get them to send a cheque and to fight the “Home Phone Deactivation Charge” as we’ve found evidence on DSL Reports that it is likely a cash grab by Bell. The interesting thing is that the amount of the charge seems to vary from person to person, which supports my opinion that Bell is simply trying to extract cash for no reason other than they think that they can.
The other thing that we’ll be doing is filing a complaint with the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services (CCTS) as this is completely unacceptable. Rumor has it that Bell deals with these complaints long before the CCTS renders a decision because all their decisions are made public and Bell doesn’t want anybody to know how bad they really are. But judging from the comments on Ellen Roseman’s Blog, lots of people have already concluded that Bell is pretty bad.
I’ll update you as to what happens next as this saga appears to be far from over.
August 24, 2010 at 7:17 am
We switched everything at home from Bell to Videotron a while back except for the 2 cell phones. My contract finally ended with Bell on August 1rst and I switched to another provider on August 4th. I have yet to pay my July invoice as it charges me until August 11th and I was no longer a customer of Bell since August 4th. I have been called and called and rudely almost threatned for payment which I refuse until I get a corrected invoice. I am now finally getting responses via email but the invoice they decided to send me not only does not credit the time on my July invoice they have the nerve to charge me for services until September!!! I am sure I will have late charges billed to my invoice too which obviously I will refuse to pay as this is all their billing errors. I will never go back to Bell the service has never improved and I’ve had my cell phone with them since 2000 and in the past had other services with them. They forget they are no longer a monopoly.