Charged and Charged Some More for Services Not Received

I’m having a major issue, which I’ve been trying to get resolved since after a storm on 9/8/23.  There was an area-wide outage in Washington, DC, after which, I’ve been paying for the NOW Wifi area hotspot while trying to get this resolved and now they’ve seemingly cut off my already paid access with the WiFi signal in order to force me to pay the disputed amount.

I arranged a Comcast/Xfinity repair person to come out on 9/16.  After area service was restored, my (COMCAST-provided/rented) router/modem still wasn’t working.  They ran an advance diagnostic without visiting and said that the box was no longer functioning and that I would have to come to one of their locations and trade it in to get a functioning one, rather than send the repair person with a working router/modem to make sure service was restored.  When I spoke to the representative on the phone, she said any associated billing would be reimbursed for the services not received.

I had to start purchasing a monthly-renewed WiFi Now pass on 9/12/23, so I wouldn’t be without WiFi coverage until I could get to the Comcast center.  I have been paying separately for this every month since then.  Yet, Comcast still charged me $85.89 on 9/27, despite the router/modem-based services of my main/original account not yet being restored.  As I was changing jobs in October, I didn’t have free time to immediately drop off the non-functioning box and the hotspot-based services were much cheaper, so I was considering changing services to the hotspot permanently.  To avoid them continuing to unauthorizedly auto-charge my credit card for services not received, I manually stopped the auto-charge function in my app.

By 11/7/24, I had been reimbursed part of my 8/27/23 payment for September, for services not received as a result of the outage, but still nothing of the $85.89 paid on 9/27/23 for October, and Comcast was continuing to charge my Xfinity account for services not received.  When I called on 11/7/23, I was told by the final representative that there had been no outages in my area and that I’d never reported it, despite me having the original Xfinity messages of them notifying customers of the outage and me responding by reporting my WiFi outage, before having called on it.  I was then told that because that’s what they’d logged in their notes, that’s the info they were going on and that the best they could do was provide a $60 reduction of the bill and that that’s all they were authorized to do and that I’d have to pay for what was by that point 2 months of unreceived services.  I told them “no,” because not only is it illegal to knowingly keep charging for services I’m not receiving or using, but they were also falsely saying I currently had service through my main account.  If that were true, why was I still paying $20/month separately for the NOW Wifi hotspot for the same address in order to have coverage?

In the meantime, I’ve had to go out and purchase tools specifically to disconnect the modem/router that their installer person overly tightened and they continued to run up my balance, charging for unreceived services, and refused to close the account without me paying for the months of unreceived services.  They only later froze my account on their end, because the balance reached $314.40 without payment.

To date, I should have a $0 balance and should have been reimbursed $85.89 for October 2023 on top of that.  However, as of today, 6/30/24, not only have I received no reimbursement to my credit card for October or Xfinity account and never again received router/modem-based Xfinity/Comcast internet since 9/8/23 for the $85.89/month they were charging, but they’ve also cut the signal of the $20/month ($10/month with special offer) NOW Wifi hotspot—paid on 6/8/24 and not set to renew for another week, to my address, seemingly as a shakedown method to pay them the $314.49, when in fact, not only do I not owe them nothing, but they owe me $85.89. 

Today, they reimbursed me the additional/separate $10 of the NOW Wifi hotspot, saying that’s all they could do and to just repurchase it when the network returns.  However, this now forces me to pay the originally disputed $314.49, because they’ve now made it, so you have to pay through the app and unable to pay for the one without paying the other.  They seemingly know exactly what they’re doing—this is fraud.

I’ve been a paying customer for a decade.  This is ridiculous.