My account was hacked in September -- Still no action from Verizon. Please help!

Question

My account was hacked in September, someone added an additional line and ordered an iPhone, adding more than $600 to my account. Verizon quickly identified this as fraud and assured me that my account would be cleaned up. Almost three months later, I still have hundreds of dollars billed to my account that no customer service rep has been able to explain. My service is now pending disconnection, even though I have continued to make my regular payments, but I have refused to pay the additional charges incurred by the hacking of my account. I've spent more than two work days on the phone with Verizon, speaking to about three dozen agents and supervisors, explaining my situation all over again, taking valuable time off work and away from the family. They all promised to help, but nobody actually fixes this mess that I did not cause. Ten days ago, I wrote a letter to customer service which I will post below. I have not heard back from Verizon. No one has called to apologize or offered help in restoring my account. As a cellular customer of 16 years, I have never experienced something like that. I simply don't know who to talk to anymore to get this straightened out. No customer deserves to be treated like this. Please help me find out who I can contact with the authority to clean this up for me! Many thanks in advance.
Here is the letter sent to Verizon with signature confirmation Monday a week ago. I does not detail today's trouble, when I spent another 90 minutes on the phone with three different agents and one supervisor, but I got disconnected every time. 
Dear ladies and gentlemen,
I am writing this as a customer complaint. My family has been a loyal Verizon Wireless customer since August 2011, after making the change from T-Mobile. We currently have the 15GB Everything Plan with five lines, all of which are used by family members. Since July, we are also customers with Verizon FIOS for our home internet and cable, which means we pay Verizon an average of $5,600 annually. 
My wife is the primary account holder and I have an EDGE plan for my own line. In September, I ordered a new iPhone through my local Verizon store in XXXXX., which is, as far as I know, an independent store with a Verizon license/franchise. When I picked up my phone, the agent at the store noticed that my account was in “chaotic standing.” First, he said that we had been advised badly by Verizon when we initially signed up in 2011, resulting in much higher monthly fees than we could have had under the 10 or 15 GB Everything Plan, and he suggested that we switch to this plan immediately.
It was frustrating to learn this, because in my two years of communicating with Verizon agents by phone, no one ever bothered to inform us that we paid more for our account than we had to and that there was a more compact plan available which would have decreased our monthly bill. My daughter exceeded her data allowance on an almost monthly basis, which we could have avoided under the plan that we currently have but didn’t know about.
Then I also learned that my current bill had suddenly skyrocketed to over $900 because a sixth line had been added to our account and someone had ordered a phone and charged it to our account. The local agent was extremely helpful, he immediately suggested that this was fraudulent activity and he called Verizon to restore my EDGE eligibility which I had lost due to these fraudulent charges that I had not caused and not paid. He did talk to the Verizon fraud department and reported the incident, and I was told that the additional charges would be taken off my account and my good credit – and EDGE eligibility – would be restored. In good faith that Verizon would take care of this, I left the store as a slightly worried, but satisfied customer.
About a week later, I called Verizon to check on my account status because I wanted to EDGE up my teenage son’s line XXXXXX and get him a new iPhone 6 for his birthday. The agent I spoke to told me that the fraud situation was still showing on my account and that my EDGE eligibility had not been restored yet, but he assured me that this would be taken care off by the following week, when my son’s line would be eligible for an EDGE upgrade under his plan’s timeline.
When I called back the following week, I was saddened to learn that contrary to the previous assurance, our EDGE eligibility had not been restored and the fraudulent charges to our account were still showing on our bill, which was quite confusing because it was impossible to figure out my actual charges. What followed was several weeks of phone correspondence with Verizon agents who apologized again and again and assured me that my EDGE eligibility would be restored so I could order my son’s phone and my the additional charges would be dropped from my account.
However, this didn’t happen. I am not going to list the entire call log, because I know that you can easily access these records. But for several weeks in October, I spent many, many hours on the phone with Verizon, explaining the entire situation regarding the fraud again and again. I listened to assurances, promises, apologies, and I was transferred multiple times to different departments to get my EDGE eligibility restored. After an incredibly frustrating and time consuming experience I was eventually able to order my son’s phone. But several days later, when I checked the order status, I noticed that the order had been canceled because – I’m sure you can guess it by now – my EDGE eligibility had still not been restored. This forced me to go through the whole process again and I spent an entire afternoon on the phone with several different agents and managers until in the early evening I was finally assured that my account standing had been restored and that I could order my son’s phone. That day alone, I had to leave work five hours early to get on the phone (from about 2 p.m. until 7 p.m.) and work this situation out so my son could get his phone, which he eventually received on Oct. 31.
I work as a newspaper reporter and I have an incredibly busy schedule. Yet the inability and unwillingness by Verizon to help me straighten out my account took much of my work time, which I had to make up for at a later time in order to get paid. Unfortunately, this meant that I had to take out much of my highly valued family time to talk to Verizon, which increased my frustration with your company, as you surely can understand. 
As a loyal customer, I can’t stress enough how incredibly frustrating this experience was. I was forced to spend many hours away from work and family just to deal with the same situation over and over again. I lost track of the hours, but I am sure that one look at your call log will confirm that adding up these hours it was more than two full work days that I had to spend on the phone to work out a situation that I did not cause to begin with. Adding to these already incredibly upsetting circumstances were at least a couple of calls where it took me 15 minutes to get an agent on the line who then promised me to transfer me to the right person to help me, only, after more waiting time on hold, to be disconnected and start the process all over again. How I was able to maintain my composure and continue to be polite and respectful to the agents, I don’t know. I’m sure they are used to much harsher treatment from other unsatisfied customer for much lesser reasons.
It is bad enough that a company like Verizon cannot protect their customers from getting their accounts hacked and hundreds of dollars being charged to their account. But what is even worse is that I have to spend hours and hours of valuable time and energy to mitigate a situation and fix a damage that I have not caused in the first place and had no control over, and Verizon has not offered me anything to reward my patience and loyalty other than brief apologies from stressed out agents that obviously were not qualified to handle such situation, resulting in their own frustration with this issue.
What adds to this extremely frustrating and highly disappointing experience is that because of the hacking and the fraudulent charges that polluted my account for many weeks, it has become impossible for me to understand what I am being charged for and what I actually owe for the services that I did order and did receive. This frustration once again peaked on Saturday last week, when an agent told me that my past-due charges are more than $600, with a total of more than $900 total due within three weeks, ( that is about the same what Verizon charged me after my account had been hacked and an additional line and phone had been ordered by the perpetrator) in spite of my continuing “blind” payments towards my balance since this all began in September.
I talked to two agents on Saturday, one from Customer Service; the other from the billing department, and neither was able to explain – or even seemed to understand themselves – how these charges occurred. In good faith, and in order to avoid a disruption of service, I still made a $170 payment, which is about half of what my total monthly payment should be under my current plan with five lines, and I vowed to pay another $170 by the end of next week in the hope that by then, someone with authority and complete and full understanding of these circumstances will have contacted me to explain my account and issue a sincere, well meant apology for what has happened to this loyal customer.
Believe me, I rarely reach out to a company and complain like this. I have a busy and hectic schedule, but the time it took me to write even this long letter to Verizon was just a fraction of the time and energy that I wasted to restore my account and get my son his new iPhone on time for his birthday, which he was looking forward to very much.
But after my experience with Verizon, I feel that Verizon should know that no loyal customer deserves this type of treatment and should ever have to go through what my family and I had to endure because of Verizon’s inability to protect the privacy and integrity of our account, and to restore it to its original standing.
I left T-Mobile in 2011 after a total of 13 years as a loyal customer, because I was unhappy with their increasingly bad customer service. I came to Verizon in the hope that my family would have a better experience here, and we were ready to stay with the company for many years to come. But at the moment, we are regretting and reconsidering our choice. Our final decision will certainly depend on the final outcome of this incredibly frustrating situation.
Believe me, I absolutely understand that fraud and the breach of customer account information occur even in the best and most professional companies. But I also believe that if this happens, the integrity and professionalism of a business must be judged based on their handling of such instances and how they treat customers who fall victim to such criminal practices without any wrong doing on their part.
A company should do their best to not only fix the damage and try to make sure that this will not happen again, but also guide and support their loyal customers affected by this and provide them with enough information to understand what is going on. Most importantly, it should be Verizon, not the customer, who should carry the burden and the responsibility of such fraud. But unfortunately, Verizon Wireless has fallen short in this regard, as we were completely left alone and forced to fight for the full restoration of our account and to this day are confused about our bill and these sky-high charges that no one can explain to us.
On top of that, I am tired of having to explain this situation dozens of times to different people with your company over and over again. No one should have to go through that, and I believe that your personnel has enough pressing business to deal with than to waste their and their customers time.
Please understand that I am not complaining about the services by the more than a dozen individual agents that I talked to in order to sort out this mess. The vast majority of them have been polite and a couple honestly tried to go out of their way to help me. It is rather the way that your customer service is set up in total that reeks of failure to support and help a customer whose account had been hacked and scrambled beyond recognition.
That’s why it is my hope that my reaching out to you will raise a red flag at the right places within your company to identify the failures in your service, work the problem and fix it so other loyal customers like me will be spared such hassle in the future. I think it wouldn’t be too far fetched to assume that we are not the only ones and last ones to fall victim to hacking and failing customer protection and service as a result.
Of course I also sincerely hope that my complaint will finally set the wheels in motion to remedy the problems in our own case.  We believe that the very least that Verizon could do as a sign of good will and to honor our customer loyalty to is sweep clean our account and allow us to start from scratch so we can track and understand our future monthly charges and continue to make reliable payments to our account as we have done for more than two years until the hacking of our account and Verizon’s unprofessional and helpless handling of the situation has changed everything.
I hope that someone within your company will take this complaint seriously and resolve this very unfortunate and frustrating situation in a manner that shows that we are valued and respected as the loyal customers that we (still) consider ourselves and that will help us restore our faith and trust in Verizon. 
I am looking forward to your timely response.

Answer 1

    I'm confident that if you have spoken with our Fraud Team directly, that there are the proper wheels in motion to resolve all of the concerns that occured as a result of the fraudulant order on your account. It may take up to 2 bill cycles for all the adjustments to be applied and the changes made to your account to bring the dates and eligibility back to normal, so you should definitely be nearing the end of your wait. Based on your description, it may have been a while since you spoke with them directly instead of the customer service team, so I encourage you to give them a call at your earliest convenience to put your worries at ease. If you need to make arrangements for the charges that appear on your account, our Financial Services Team at 866-266-1445 will also be able to help possibly place a hold on the account regarding the disputed charges so there's no accidental inturruption in your service due to this unfortunate situation.
JenniferH_VZW
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