Comment by flovec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flovec | Hacker News Reader

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I've had success pursuing bad i.e. potentially illegal cancellation practices by filing a complaint through the attorney general's office where the company is located.

In my case: 1) First I had a rough time cancelling my account _in person_ at a T-mobile store. The remote T-mobile employees in charge of cancellation kept hanging up on the T-mobile employees calling them from the store because cancellations are bad. This was so normal to the local T-mobile employees it was laughable to them. 2) T-mobile never cancelled my account - they suspended it...and didn't tell me! They reopened it 6 months later, charged me for a few months w/o notifying me, then sent the unpaid dues to a local debt collector. I only found out after being contacted by a debt collection agency.

I was able to get both T-mobile and the collection agency they work with to "look into it", but I could not get a direct answer from T-mobile about how to fix the situation after multiple calls to them, and the collection agency relied on T-mobile to strike the debt clean.

Bob Ferguson is the attorney general for Washington where T-mobile's HQ is. Bob is THE man in case you were wondering. After filing a complaint to his office, which was then forwarded to T-mobile, I heard back from someone at T-mobile specializing in these situations in a week's time and was informed the situation was fixed and the debt was removed from my credit report.

Wow, had similar. I cancelled online, they said my account was in good standing, nothing owed, and killed my t-mobile.com account.

A few months later I got a collections notice for $500 from t-mobile, went to a t-mobile store, said that my account looked weird, and they had recorded me as not owning my phone, despite a clear account history that I paid full price for the phone and didn't owe anything.

Still get collection notices, but it's now over 7 years, and my credit card recovered by some 70 points or so when it aged out.

All these stories... is this an American-only thing and is common place? Because there’s no way that could happen here in Australia

I don’t know if it’s American-only, but it’s definitely common place in America. These stories are particularly bad but none of them are surprising to me.

I actually found the NYT cancellation process to be relatively painless to be honest. That’s how accustomed I am to painful cancellation experiences.

It’s mostly American. We don’t have their kind of credit rating system in Australia.

FCRA claim for damages if you were denied credit or paid a higher price for something, like a mortgage or car insurance.

T-mobile can be dirty. The law specifically prohibits holding numbers hostage--but they found a way to try anyway. My employer had gone under, I wanted to keep my number. No problem with my employer, they released it. The problem was I was trying to port the number to a pre-paid T-mobile number (at the time you could buy 1000 minutes for $100/year, the unused minutes rolled over. For light use it was the best deal out there.) The port kept failing, though, puzzling the employees. I finally got the truth out of someone in a call center--there was a big bill owed (duh! But I wasn't the responsible party.) I pointed out that what they were doing was illegal, the person I was talking to didn't care.

A letter to the regulators, though, a few days later I got a call from a much more friendly person who made it work like it should have. It's amazing how much better companies behave when the regulators come calling.

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