Is it humanly possible to talk on the phone for 17 hours straight? Instead of spending precious hours on the internet trying to figure out who the Yellow King is, New Jersey resident Michael Pratt has been trapped in a phone company nightmare trying to get an answer to that philosophical query.
Pratt tells NBC that he received a phone bill from Verizon last year for more than $2,690. The 68-year-old laundromat owner from Elk Township found out that much of that was due to a call lasting 17 hours and 44 minutes. Pratt eventually traced all of this to a call made by his daughter during a family trip to a Caribbean island—she had left her credit card and cell phone back at home, so she used his cell to call her bank and have a replacement card sent over.
"She borrowed my phone. She made one phone call and that’s when everything started," he said. "She finally got the cards, but when I got home, I got this horrendous bill." And this is where it gets confusing:
On Pratt’s bill, which he provided to NBC10.com, there were 36 charges tied to a toll-free number stretching from 3:38 p.m. on Saturday Oct. 26, 2013 until 9:22 a.m. the following day. Thirty-four of the charges were billed in 30 minute increments, all to the same number, each time stamped at either 22 minutes or 52 minutes past every hour. At $1.99 a minute, that one phone call totaled $2,073.58.
Sounds like an error by Verizon, right? Pratt contacted Verizon to clear things up, and ended up getting strung along for four months only to be denied by the company, who told him, "‘Well we can’t do nothing, it was your problem, you used the phone.’ Well I didn’t use it for 17 hours," he said.
And here's where it gets even more confusing:
A call to the 800 number listed on the bill is met with an automated system for mobile phone carrier Sprint. Pratt believes someone else handled the international call and billed Verizon for the roaming, who in turn billed him.
"They talked to the roaming carrier and said I used the phone. Well I didn’t use the phone. My daughter used it one time and once the connection broke, the roaming charges should have stopped," he said.
Pratt’s bill shows he also made nearly three dozen other phone calls to the U.S. from Aruba on his phone without experiencing the same issue.
Funny enough, once NBC started inquiring about the story, Verizon decided it would remove the charges, taxes and fees from Pratt’s bill. All's well that end's well, except for the four-plus months spent trying to escape a bureaucratic nightmare while mainlining the secret truth of the universe.
