Leon Thompson called our small business claiming to be with "AT&T Billing". We'd had some issues with our AT&T bill and I thought he was calling to resolve those issues. He said that changes in FCC regulations had forced AT&T to call all their customers to inform us that our long distance billing would flow through a non-affiliated billing agent back onto our AT&T bill. The amount of our monthly bill wouldn't change.

During the verification process, the "3rd party agent" mentioned an additional monthly long distance charge and rate of 5 cents per minute. I interrupted at this point say that we had unlimited US long distance as part of our AT&T plan. Leon Thompson came back on the line and told me that we'd have to start again since I interrupted the flow of questions. According to Thompson, the "5 cent" charge only applied to extremely rare ("a solar eclipse happening at the same time as Halley's Comet") situations when a call might be routed to some odd carrier (he was a bit vague on this). We began the verification process again. I googled "AT&T NSBI" during the process and saw that many had reported NSBI as a scammer. I asked during the recording if the really was AT&T. The verification agent hung up on me.

It seems that the verification agent must be in on the scam as well.

I received a call from a Mary Stevens from the 'AT&T notification department' to tell me that AT&T was changing it's long distance billing carrier from World Com to NSBI. My bills would not look any different but in order to continue receiving one bill AND have a reduced monthly long distance fee, I needed to verify thru a 3rd party administrator that I wanted to do so.

I was specifically told 3X NOT to ask questions to the 3rd party administrator as it would cancel the order and I would start receiving 2 bills and not benefit from the new lower long distance monthly fee.

Once I was switched to the 3rd party verification administrator, the conversation went so fast I had to ask the person to repeat himself 3 times! At the very end, I caught him saying that I had agreed to change my long distance CARRIER to NSBI... not just the long distance billing agent!

Once I got of the phone, I called AT&T to verify and was told it was a scam. AT&T has now updated all our phone lines so that they are supposedly protected from being switched over. I also called the 1-888 number given to me by the 3rd party admin and I swear the same person answered the phone! When I complained that his company tried to scam me, he immediately took my phone number and told me that the order would be canceled on that line and any line that I had given to Mary. He also said that Mary should not have told me that she was from AT&T!