T-Mobile Corporate Billing Policy

Update 12/12/11: T-Mobile resolved the issue in my favor by issuing a satisfactory credit to my account.

In late October of this year, my wife and I changed our cellular service after six or so years from T-Mobile to Verizon. We were six days into our T-Mobile billing cycle when we changed service.

Today I received our final bill for those final six days of service and discovered T-Mobile charged us for an entire month of service! I called Customer Service and the first representative explained this a corporate policy. I responded that the policy of charging for an entire month instead of prorating the service didn’t make sense and was an unfair business practice. He did not relent.

I asked to speak with his supervisor and she informed me that during internal meetings held with management, upper management instructed them to deny prorated billing for final invoiced bills. I told her that I needed to know the next appeal step and explained my logic.

I politely, yet firmly explained, that the invoiced amount due was not over $100, yet the principle involved motivates me to deny paying an amount beyond a prorated amount. That if a court case arose from this matter, I think that my jury of peers would side with me and set the amount actually due as prorated. Think of all the internal costs that T-Mobile will incur fighting my position and the resulting court time and expense.

This is the kind of corporate logic that is short-sighted and leads to exposure by people like me by blogging, that will endeavor to perservere with fair decision making against policies that go against the American way like T-Mobile does.

If we citizens don’t stand up against corporate extortion when we face it, then we only have ourselves to blame.