Scams and Frauds

Please, please, please be careful out there!

This article appeared in yesterdays News-Press.

In June I received a telephone call at the store from someone veryifying my store name, address, etc. Suddenly the phone is given to another person telling me about the website they are going to build for me. No matter how many times I said NO they kept going about how this would be charged to my phone bill, etc. I finally hung up on them. But I knew something wasn't right.

I called the phone company immediately, they said they wouldn't bill me for something like that and that I should call my yellow pages account telephone number. They said they didn't know anything about it either.

I was really shaken by this incident, but eventually put it out of my mind. I've been much more abrupt with other similar telephone calls, refusing to answer any questions at all or give any information.

And then my phone bill came. $130 charge on it for this web crap that I had flatly refused. I was so upset!

I googled ILD, the company the charges originated from. They are just a third party billing company and were billing me on someone else's behalf. Unfortunately, what I found was that a lot of other people had had trouble with ILD charges showing up on their phone bill. I was now even more upset!

My wonderful husband offered to deal with this for me. Thank goodness! He, hopefully, has solved the problem and the charges will be removed and won't continue. It took him hours of telephone calls to deal with this mess.

Obviously, my frustration stems from the fact that I didn't authorize the service and I definately didn't authorize them to bill through my telephone bill. What a scam! They don't even have to get credit card information from me to charge me for things.

According to Embarq, they have to allow third party billing on their accounts. They do not give you a choice on this, BUT if you request that third party billing not be accepted on your account then it won't be. So you MUST call them.

I'm hoping that my problem has been solved, but I know they'll try this, or some other scam, on other people, so please be careful!