Yesterday afternoon the home phone rings, its telstra and some young girl starts rattling off that the call may be monitored for training purposes and asks if im ok with that to which i say yes thats fine. Then she asks me to say my full name DOB and address for security reasons so i do, beautiful.. or so i thought.
She then goes on to say that i am 'a little' behind in my phone bill, which i already knew and working on it. She then says on their records they haven't recieved ANY payments for our service i say thats impossible she said from what shes looking at theres nothing to say we've ever made payments..
Ok we moved into this house in MAY last year i find it hard to believe that in almost a year of being with them that we haven't made any payments. She said yeah we are looking at suspending your service. I said (trying not to sound sarcastic or rude) umm wouldn't you have suspended our service months and months ago? and she said well yeah.. and i said i remember a lady calling me saying our service was going to suspended and i remember going to the post office the next day and paying off the entire bill.
She then said well your account is behind (now listen to this) by $400 and something dollars... Ok if we have NEVER paid a bill and we use our phone daily, i call mobiles im sure our bill would be into the THOUSANDS being close to a year to having the service. i said that to her and she said oh maybe you changed providers last year, um no iv always been with telstra..
She then said to prove we have made payments and to stop them turning us off we have to find every receipt.. well thats going to be impossible they could be anywhere..
though atleast we only really have to pay $400.. i mean if thats how much we've racked up in a year..
i would ring telstra back and ask them and tell them abou tthe call, it does sound weird, and yeah, im sure they wouldn't just let your servce stay connected if you had never paid a bill!!
That sounds a little odd (speaking as a former Telstra credit management person). However it is not unknown for lack of payments to go under the radar for many months and huge bills to be faced. In that instance a payment plan would be offered to you, not a demand for immediate payment. And they would send you a letter informing you before suspension. 2 letters minimum in fact. How do you receive your bills, email or paper? Check your junk email because if they have gotten lost in there it is possible you have missed them.
Have you got online banking? That might be the easiest way to check your payments. If not try to find any receipt, and it should give you a reference of sorts. This will be enough for your bank to check the transaction and ensure you were paying to the correct account. We used to see people mispaying their account by one digit and paying someone else's bill by mistake, and that can be fixed quite easily.
Firstly of course call Telstra with your information to find out if it was a genuine call.
When you call them ask if you can add a password to your account or something because if this woman is not from Telstra she now has access to you account via fraud because she has the details required to prove ID over the phone. Definitely call them and confirm it was them though because this could be pretty dangerous.
have you set up or ended a single bill (with internet or mobiles?) in that time? account numbers can change when you make any changes to those sorts of services. also, in the past year or so, all accounts have been migrated from one accounting system to another. it may be that, in the trasnfer, previous payment history isn't showing on the new system... call and check that there is record on your file of the contact you received just to confirm it was someone from Telstra. then make a payment arrangement for the bill
Does this seem a bit odd to you?
i say thats impossible she said from what shes looking at theres nothing to say we've ever made payments..
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