Back in August I was out of work on disability, so on August 20th 2009 I called Qwest to cancel my internet service to save money. I called and talked to a representative named Tad (agent code 0202A), I told him that we may be moving, because I was embarrassed to tell him that money was so tight from being out of work I wasn’t sure we’d be able to make our house payments. He told me that because I had been a loyal customer since 2005 I qualified for 6 months free internet. I asked if it would enter me into a new contract and he assured me that it would not, that I could cancel at the end of the 6 months or any other time if I wanted to. So I agreed to it only to find on a later bill that he had indeed entered me into a new 24 month agreement. When I discovered this I called Qwest, on January 4th 2010, the first person I talked to told me there was nothing they could do. They then transferred me to their loyalty department and when I brought up I was planning on filing a report with the FCC if they weren’t willing to fix the problem they then transferred me to a supervisor, Darnell (agent code 1203222). He told me the only thing that could be done was to cancel my service, pay the $200 cancellation fee, and then I could get a credit for the $200 on my next bill. I didn’t want to cancel, I just wanted to know why I was in an agreement and I wanted out of it so that if money got tight again I could cancel it if necessary. When I told him I never agreed to a 24 month commitment he told me that their records said I went through an automated system and pressed 1 to agree to the commitment. I never went through any automated system, I asked and reconfirmed many times that I would NOT be entering into an agreement. I asked him how he could prove I went through it and all he could say was that their system said I had. After that my husband got on the phone and asked what guarantee we had that we would get the $200 credit if we just canceled our service, since they had guaranteed us that we wouldn’t be entering a new agreement when we got the 6 month credit. Darnell then said that there was no guarantee, and we would actually have to call in after it was cancelled and they would either give us the credit or not. This was after he assured me that we could get the credit, he never mentioned anything about having to call in or that a credit was only a possibility.

The thing that irritates me most is that we didn’t even want to cancel. We just wanted to have the option to cancel in case money got tight in the future. Thus Qwest has forced us to continue to use the remainder of our credit while we save up the $200 to pay for the cancellation and then ask for and hope we get it credited or paid back to us. Which I am positive we will not get back because of what happened with to use when we called in August and what Dranell said. We will also be filled a complaint with the FCC reference #10-C00185230.