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Former CenturyLink Employee Accuses Company of Running a Wells Fargo-Like Scheme (bloomberg.com)
A former CenturyLink employee has filed a lawsuit this week claiming she was fired for "blowing the whistle on the telecommunications company's high-pressure sales culture that left customers paying millions of dollars for accounts they didn't request," reports Bloomberg. From the report: The plaintiff, Heidi Heiser, worked from her home for CenturyLink as a customer service and sales agent from August 2015 to October 2016. The suit claims she was fired days after notifying Chief Executive Officer Glen Post of the alleged scheme during a companywide question-and-answer session held on an internal message board. The complaint alleges CenturyLink "allowed persons who had a personal incentive to add services or lines to customer accounts to falsely indicate on the CenturyLink system the approval by a customer of new lines or services." This would sometimes result in charges that hadn't been authorized by customers, according to the complaint. Heiser's complaint alleges that she became increasingly concerned about what she observed at CenturyLink after news of Wells Fargo & Co.'s regulatory troubles broke in September. In that case, Wells Fargo employees opened deposit and credit card accounts without customers' consent to earn incentives and meet sales goals. Without admitting wrongdoing, Wells Fargo ended up firing more than 5,000 employees and agreeing to pay $185 million in fines, in addition to compensating customers for fees related to the unauthorized accounts. The complaint likens what Heiser said CenturyLink sales agents did to the Wells Fargo scandal and estimated the alleged unauthorized fees amounted to "many millions" of dollars. She says her concerns were bolstered by posts she had read on review websites.
Besides signing up entire new accounts, they add services to existing accounts without asking. They also will up-sell you on "free" services that require service fees up the ass. I've been fighting with them for months to remove all this bullshit off of a family member's bill. On top of that, they are charging sales tax on arbitrary amounts on the bill, and their percentages between state and local (both of which SHOULD be based on the same initial figure) don't calculate out properly at all. I've tried going into the store, calling tech support, calling billing support, and when I ask, they all just hang up on me (or when I went into the physical store, the guy just called their billing department, which I already did, and then handed me the phone and refused to speak with me about the billing questions)
I'm already paying CenturyLink way too much for the services I actually requested!
We recently tried to pare back our CenturyLink service from their antiquated dsl and a landline to just the barest of landlines. The order confirmation twice has consisted of a bunch of extra stuff like a long distance plan, etc. It has almost been like their order taking staff made up after the fact what they wanted us to have rather than what we ordered.
It's become apparent ( and is in part the reason we've finally shut off their dsl and lept into the maw of Xfinity!) that really corrupt shit has been happening at CL. Customer service so bad it has seemed like they just didn't want to sell services over copper anymore.
Let's look at Wells Fargo, with all its money laundering and phony accounts, and they are doing better than ever, just like all the other crooked banks. Extortion works, eh? However CenturyLink, whoever thy are, is a two bit player. They can't bring down the economy like Wells Fargo can. So if the story is true, somebody might actually go to jail for it, but I doubt it. This kind of fraud is pretty standard stuff.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
NextDoor is *full* of stories of people who signed up for service with "special package" offered door-to-door, only to receive bills that have a pile of extra crap on them, equating to 3-4X the agreed-upon monthly price. People are spending hours and hours on the phone transfered all over the place, told that it's "fixed", then get the same bill (or higher) the next month. This goes on for month after month for a lot of people.
Now, I just signed up for gig fiber and nothing else through their website (yes, it's stupidly fast, even over long-haul. for now.). I will be watching my bill like a HAWK and simply refusing to pay for anything I did not sign up for. I have screenshots of each stage in the order process which show *exactly* what I ordered and how much I should be paying (of course, taxes and "fees" aren't shown...) and will go to the BBB and PUC at the first sign of trouble.
This sounds like a perfect time for more deregulation. And maybe another round of bailouts.
You are welcome on my lawn.
monopoly. On my street in Seattle, CenturyLink only provides "up to 1.5 Mbps" DSL:
http://imgur.com/WgSvnA5
Even that isn't reliable so I had to drop back down to dial-up again. It sucks that CenturyLink has taken so much money in taxes to provide universal service, but they are not offering it.
It's called the "Welcome to America" package where I work.
And even worse is the fact that Comcast has the govenrment-granted monopoly over most of the city, but they don't offer service to anywhere near all of it.
CenturyLink charged me for services they never rendered, then didn't cancel them when I called it, and I had to fight them for months to get the service shutdown, then they would only refund the last three months. They also added a phone line after I explicitly told them not to.
had to go AC to not waste the mod points I already spent, but I'm so sick of dealing with CenturyLink that I'd just rather accept paying a few more dollars on my bill rather than fighting their customer DIS-service reps over it.
They've just made themselves so hard to deal with and I have no other choice besides Comcast whose customer DIS-service is just as bad.
I noticed the other day my internet connection was slow. I'm paying for 45 Mbps down, but I'm getting between 10-15 instead. It used to be that fast, but now it's not and it is simply not worth it to me to spend the time to try to convince CenturyLink that they're not delivering what I'm paying for.
One of the things they always say that pisses me off the most is "There's no reported outages in your area". We'll, I'm fucking reporting an outage in my area now!
The last time this happened it was 9 hours before they acknowledged there was in fact an outage in my "area".
I have accounts at Wells Fargo, mostly because I'm too lazy to move them to a credit union. I keep high balances so it's free, and the branch is convenient.
I recently sold a boat and had to pay the loan off at another bank as quickly as possible to get the lien release for the buyer. I went into the bank that held the note, and they said they could process the lien release same day if I wired the money to pay off the loan. They gave me their wire transfer info, and I went into Wells to wire the money.
Wells wanted $30 for the transfer of $19,800. I complained, long time customer, etc, and they wouldn't waive it. So I said "OK, why don't you just give me $19,800 in cash. You could, of course, just do the wire transfer for nothing because it would save your employees the labor of counting the cash and the Treasury reporting for cash withdrawals in excess of $10,000."
They still refused, so I took the cash. They tried to give it to me with just a money counter total, but I made the teller count it manually in front of me, too.
I have the dubious pleasure of "enjoying" the services of Wells and Century Link. A few years ago, I could not walk into that bank without an employee, under the guise of better customer "service" trying to hawk credit cards, various of combined account services, and other crap. Even the tellers. For internet the choices here are the race to the bottom competition between Comcast and Century Link. Don't want to pay for cable, so we have CL. And for $45/month we get 3/0.7 Mbs down/up. Called yesterday to ask what are we paying for. Dude on the other end runs a test and says 3.5/0.7, refused to tell us what we should be getting, and tried to hawk an upgrade. The people really getting shafted here are low level employees these ratf*ck companies.
CenturyLink is notorious for burying startup ISPs that would compete with them in preliminary injunctions and then dragging the cases out in court until the startup goes bankrupt from lawyer fees. They're one of the major ISPs that shut down North Carolina municipal broadband. They have obtained an obscene government grant to expand rural broadband yet every rural area I go to has pretty much the same CenturyLink service as they did five years ago: you're lucky if you get one megabit. They got one five years ago too.
CenturyLink is about as evil of a corporation as you can get. They constantly cut off all attempts to bring better internet service to areas (even if they don't serve them yet!) while not improving their offerings significantly enough compared to the amount of cash they're raking in from customers and government grants.
Isn't it ironic that they're slated to get $3 BILLION in grants over the next six years, yet they claim municipal broadband funded by local-level tax dollars is "unfair competition?"
Posting anonymously only because CenturyLink could easily sue me otherwise.
I remember hearing lots of people complaining about issues like this with GTE back in the day, they got bought by Verizon then spun off and repackaged as centurylink. So this isn't new.
Sure.... more deregulation is great, IF that includes removal of all the government granted exceptions to free market participation these telcos still receive!
As I've always said before: Comcast would be out of business, they way they've done business, if they were competing in a real free market. Apparently, same can be said for CenturyTel.
I'll have to say, CenturyLink did an AWFUL job as the "middle man" selling our company a fiber broadband connection in to one of their offices in the midwest.
We signed a contract with them because they guaranteed us a rate far below the next lowest bid we received, so we were willing to put up with a certain amount of inferior customer service.... I mean, once fiber is installed, it usually "just works" -- and the random, occasional outage is something that happens no matter which company you pay. (Can't stop the idiot with a backhoe who digs without checking what's in the ground first, etc.)
But the insanity started, just getting the initial connection up and running. CenturyTel kept scheduling installation appointment times where a technician would show up, but then was stuck because he had to call in to get things done on the back end. They'd put him on endless hold, followed by one excuse for another -- causing him to have to leave and reschedule another time! This went on for at least 3 appointments in a row. One time, the call center actually told the guy "Everyone was in a company meeting so nobody could assist him with the install." Who runs a call center like that?!