Verizon's HOPE Scam

It's tradition.

At every HOPE conference, we get a traditional landline for us to make phone calls during our social engineering panel.  Sure, we could use Skype or any number of Internet-based services.  But there's nothing quite like a good old-fashioned dial tone.  And, if we didn't insist on doing this, we wouldn't be able to know what our friends at Verizon are up to these days.  And, wow, were we ever surprised!

Turns out installing a phone line isn't as simple as, well, installing a phone line.  At least, not for Verizon.  Sure, they're a phone company - they used to sorta be the phone company.  But what we had to go through to get this line installed was nothing short of absurd.  There needs to be a stronger word.  Insanely absurd.  Ridiculously so.

Now keep in mind the fact that they've done this before many times to the exact same box.  For all we know, they just have to enter a couple of keystrokes to activate it.  But the aforementioned tradition involves sending a guy out to physically check.  So that's what happened - and we made sure to send someone out to ensure the guy got access to the room he needed.  We got word that the job was complete, but when we went back to check ourselves since we're paranoid, there was no dial tone in the box where it was supposed to be!  One would think they'd check for such a thing.  They didn't.  On no less than three separate appointments, they either didn't show up, disappeared after showing up, or were unable to figure out how to get a damn phone line working in the hotel!

And when it was all over and the phone line finally got installed nearly a month after this whole thing started, they had already sent us our first bill!  But it gets better.  Rather than credit us for all of the time we didn't have a phone line, they actually billed us for the service calls!  Because we had the audacity to keep asking them to finish what they started.  Apparently, that's asking for something extra in today's Verizon.

Did we just say it gets better?  Because it gets better still.

See, we literally only needed this phone line for three days.  But we're forced to pay for an entire month.  That's O.K., those are the rules and we knew this going in.  It's that good old tradition again.  But what we didn't know - and what they didn't tell us - is that they have a little surprise for people who don't use their long distance service enough.  We specifically asked for something that wasn't expensive.  We'd been hosed before by AT&T who charged us several dollars a minute for a call, just because we hadn't committed to a plan with them.  We wanted to avoid that scam so we asked Verizon to sign us up for a plan where the long distance rates were reasonable.  And they did!  Pennies a minute was what they told us.

But here's what they didn't tell us.  Apparently, they have a $50 minimum on that plan.  So while we only spent 21 cents on a phone call, we're expected to pay another $49.79 for having the stupid plan in the first place!  That, and they charged us a late fee while we were still trying to sort this out, so with all the surcharges and taxes, we're now flirting with $70 for a single one minute call to Connecticut.  And we suspect they still haven't removed the phone line, despite our requests, so they can keep charging us.  But that we expected.  Some traditions die hard, after all.

If this continues, you're looking at our newest regular column.