COLLINSVILLE, Okla. — A Collinsville man's phone bill quadrupled in just a month.
“It just feels like they’ve lied to me multiple times in the span of a month now, they haven’t done anything for me and I still don’t have the money back that they took," said Connor Peterson.
He just switched his cell phone service from Verizon to AT&T. He said better rates and a good promotion caught his eye, so he jumped on it. A few months in, he's second guessing his decision to change providers.
“Started receiving emails and texts saying ‘hey you’re going to get charged for $1,200 if you don’t return the new phone you bought since you never activated it,’" said Peterson. "Now obviously I’d been using the new phone the whole time, so this was a bit confusing to me.”
![att charges](https://ewscripps.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/4f7487f/2147483647/strip/true/crop/645x1398+0+0/resize/645x1398!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fewscripps-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fed%2Fec%2F6ecd724f429ea7eed5b3618e4aa2%2Fimg-0134.jpg)
Presuming it was an error message, Peterson went to his local AT&T store. The agents he talked to agreed, and told him to disregard the message. A month and a half later he got another notice he owed $1,200 for not activating the phone he'd been using since May.
Peterson then called the customer support line. They created a claim, the agent said they would revise the issue and told Peterson he would not be billed.
He never heard back after the claim was opened, so Peterson went back to his local AT&T. That team called customer care for him, and advised Peterson the issue is resolved and he would not be billed.
But on August 13th...
“The original bill for the phone I think should have been like 60 or 70 dollars and this month I was billed $1,297.”
The most interesting part of Peterson's situation is the exact same thing happened to his father just a few years ago.
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2 News Problem Solvers helped his dad, so Peterson reached out to us too. We reached out to the customer care line to see if we could resolve the issue.
After talking to an agent for half an hour, they said they could not help any further, redirecting the call to the main menu.
2 News then reached out to AT&T's media relations team. Within minutes, agents responded and said they would look into the problem and update us with how they planned to help Peterson.
Although his billing issue is on multiple departments radar, Peterson is not convinced he'll get his money back.
“After the first two lies that they gave me that it was fixed, I’m pretty hesitant to believe them that anything’s going to get fixed now.”
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