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ZPDI - Regular Carrier Unavailable

ZPDI • Feds Settle with BSG/ZPDI/Billing Concepts • Disputed Collect Calls • Expensive Collect Calls • Calling Card Calls • Hotel Room Calls • Scam Calls from Mexico • "Regular Carrier Unavailable" • Calls through Opticom --- • Congressional Action Needed to Stop ZPDI • You can fight back • ZPDI: What Can Consumers Do? • Consumer complaints about ZPDI and WXT Communications • Who's Behind ZPDI?

Kathy of Washington DC writes (5/3/01):
There was a $110.56 charge for a service called ZERO PLUS DIALING on our Verizon phone bill for our in-home office. The call was to a number in the UK that is unfamiliar to us. (The number that appears on the bill is incomplete so we cannot call it to determine who was called.) In addition to the charge for the call was a $16.01 charge Monthly charge for Billing Surcharge and Federal Taxes and a $9.75 charge for something called UNIV SVD F ND.

Our usual long distance service is provided by NEXTEL, which charges us between 11 and 12 cents per minute for calls to the UK. With NEXTEL the charge for a 65 minute call to UK would have been somewhere in the $7-$8 dollar range. I called VERIZON and was gaven some song and dance about Zero Plus Dialing kicking in when our long distance provider was unavailable. NONSENSE! We are on long distance calls all the time and have NEVER had a problem with NEXTEL being unavailable on our office phone.

The Verizon Customer Service Rep told me that they would discount the cost of the call by approximately $75 and that they would forgive the Monthly Charge and the Miscellaneous Charges, leaving us with a $35.00 charge for a call that we do not believe that we made at all! Verizon obviously knows about this scam -- why else would they be so willing to "discount" the charges and "forgive" the Monthly and Miscellaneous Charges? I plan to take this up with Verizon again tomorrow and they WILL take the charge off of my account (I can be extraordinarily nasty when I've been scammed) but, I would like to register my complaint and warn others to be wary of this company and of Verizon's unwillingness to deal with this problem in a businesslike manner.