We were shocked to find unauthorized mothly charges of @12.95 (plus tax) by http://www.itechpcsolutions.com in our Verizon bill...for a company like Verizon for let http://www.itechpcsolutions.com have access to its billing system is shocking....it took me about an hour to call around and get the charges credited, however, I have not yet seemn the changes relfect on my bill.....I hope Verizon will take some serious action against http://www.itechpcsolutions.com...............
Third Party Billing is something Verizon is mandated to provide to other companies per the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This isn't Verizon's doing, and often times this information just gets leaked or released from other companies or even from your own machine if something had at one point infected your computer should you have happened to have information on your machine indicating you had a landline. You'll often find when you reach out to Verizon that they are unable to credit the charges as these are things they do not create. They will typically have you check your bill for references on how to remove those charges or contact the 3rd party service. The Verizon reps refer to this as Cramming.
What you should do is first speak to Verizon and ask them to disable 3rd party billing for your account. This will ensure whoever is adding charges to your bill can no longer do so. It takes no time at all to do and takes effect immediately. From that point, take a look at your Verizon bill and look under the Misc. Services/3rd Party Charges section. On the left of the bill you should see the contact information for the companies who are charging you for services. Give the phone number a call, ask for the service to be canceled and ask for a refund (check your bil history for a record on how far it goes, better to be honest with them!). Most of the time the refund will be sent to Verizon to add to your bill as a credit, which despite 3rd party billing blocks, will still be able to slip in (which is a GOOD thing). Sometimes if a credit is too large for the company at the other end to issue just like that to a Telephone bill, they may send you a check in the mail. Whether or not they will is another question, but rest assured if they don't adhere to your request to end the charges, You and Verizon can certainly throw some power against them.
This stuff happens all the time. I wish people were made aware of these things especially in this digital world where phone numbers can be easily looked up by exchange and also the ease of signing up for things and clicking through agreements online. I'm amazed at the amount of garbage I see people going through while cleaning up their PCs during my day job of a computer technician, so I really wouldn't doubt the fact that something they did might have gotten their info into the wrong hands. Whenever they ask me about their $80+ phone bill, I always ask them to show the bill to me. Yeah, I know dial tone charges are $15 a month and Federal Taxes are another $13 a month in my area, but once I find what's racking their bill up it's real easy to get a Verizon bill down to $40 or less for POTS Telephone. The last bill I saw, I actually helped that person get Phone Service for free for two months due to the amount of credits that were put onto the account.
To FiOS users: I hope this will be helpful to you.
After I read ChanderKhanna's message, I remembered that I had put Bill Block on my Verizon account, having had a similar cramming experience many years ago. But since when you sign up for FiOS you apparently become a new person, I thought I'd better confirm that I still had Bill Block. I sent a message asking to confirm that I still had it, and this is the answer I received:
"...Bill block isn't applicable to Verizon's new FiOS digital voice service. With this new service, no third party charges appear on your bill, even if requested, this is why you cannot receive collect calls or third party calls with your new FiOS digital voice service.
"So while the old bill block isn't available, the result will be the same that you won't receive charges from third party companies."
So if you're using FiOS, you have one less thing to worry about -- assuming, of course, that it's true and it works.
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