Wade Oosterman, President,
Bell Mobility,
1, Carrefour Alexander Graham Bell,
Building A Fourth Floor,
Verdun, Quebec, H3E 3B3 2011

Dear Mr. Oosterman,

Identity Theft

It may seem inappropriate for me to be writing to yourself about this matter, but your web site and your staff make it extremely difficult to identify just who is the right person. I will return to this later, but my most pressing concern is that I appear to have been the victim of identity theft, in order to obtain services from you company.

Let me make it quite clear, I have never sought to purchase any equipment or service from Bell Canada, and after this experience it is highly improbable that I will do so in the future. Yet last week I received a letter dated June 7th informing me that I owed $****.** on account number ************.

It would appear that I have been the victim of identity theft in the purchase of service from your company; and to discover the extent to which my identity has been abused I need all the information I can gather to lay before the RCMP.

This morning I first contacted Darlins (?). Unfortunately she was almost unintelligible in English. She also refused to serve me unless I provided additional personal information including my date of birth. Since my personal information has already been abused, you should understand why I demurred. Besides, I have no way of knowing (and neither does she) whether the person who abused my name knows my date of birth. It is irrelevant at this point.

I asked Darlins to transfer me to her supervisor, but the call was dropped.

I called back and spoke with Esther, who volunteered the information that the account number was linked to a mobile phone number *** *** ****. She refused to provide me with the name of the city or business where the ‘phone and/or service were purchased, unless I provided my date of birth. Again I demurred and asked to speak to her Supervisor, and was transferred to Sophie.

Sophie told me that the service had been purchased on *** **th in ******, which is where I live. However ****** is only a residential community ….. and has no retail businesses whatsoever. Sophie refused to provide me with any more information so I asked to be transferred to your company’s security department. She said she would do so, but a period of about 5 minutes elapsed during which I could hear voices talking in the background, but no one spoke to me. It appeared that Sophie had simply put the ‘phone down on her desk.

As a responsible corporate entity Bell Mobility has a responsibility to assist in the identification and prevention of identity theft. Far from making communication with your company transparent, there are layers of obfuscation which many may find daunting. However I prize the value of my good name highly and will not allow this matter to drop until the culprit who has been abusing it is apprehended.

To this end I request that Bell provide all necessary information to myself or through ********** RCMP. I also expect an early confirmation from Bell Mobility that this matter has been taken under advisement.

This was written over 2 months ago and I have not received a response. IN the intering I have started receiving threatening ‘phone calls from a debt collection agency.

I have subsequently written to a provincial privacy commissioner who has in effect confirmed that my privacy rights have been violated by Bell Canada. However since Bell is a trasnational company, my complaint has been re-driected to the Canadian federal privacy commissioner.

It transpires that this so-called ‘debt’ has now been reported to a credit rating agency - even though I have never had any dealings whatsoever with Bell Canada or any of its subsidiaries.

Many may feel it is not worth the trouble to respond to this abuse, but I consider my ‘good name’ to be a prized asset and am not about to back down or let it drop. Fortunately I have the wherewithall to fight this battle - all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada if necessary.

I encourage all victims of Bell Canada to take the same determined approach.

when i finally got the service installed, i ended up phoning tech support pretty much daily - literally - for over two months just *screaming* because network speeds were so slow i couldn’t even use bell’s own speedcheck utility - the page kept timing out. speeds recorded on speedtest.net were as low as 0.09kbps - this, on a DSL line that was supposed to be 6MBps!

“when i signed up, i was told i’d be getting the fastest speed on the fastest network,” i said. “nobody told me oh, except for 6pm to midnight weekdays and pretty much all weekends when the network will be so choked up you might as well go read a book while waiting for the pages to load! then i also pointed out that ppl in my little town are paying the same price as ppl in the GTA who don’t have this problem, yet we are not getting the same service AND that bell has known about this problem since january yet, not only was i not informed, but here it is june and there’s no interest in fixing this problem. do i really need to go to the competition bureau?”

i was on the phone with the tech centre as they were explanding capacity at the central office - and it’s been golden ever since.

four months’ free internet service doesn’t hurt, either: tip - every time (EVERY time!) they miss an appt or cause serious inconvenience, ask for a supervisor and request compensation for your inconvenience.

i used to work in a call centre for telephone service - alberta is telus, not bell.

so i’m not sure where you came from with that.

1) I’ve received 3 separate automated email notifications over a period of a couple weeks indicating changes to my account — such as passwords and usernames — which I did not authorize. But when I phoned each time, they insisted that no changes have been made, no record of such changes exists, they could not identify what these changes were or why I was receiving these emails, and each technician gave me a different explanation.

2) Constant outages & “flickering” of service, sometimes several times per day, each time requiring pressing the reset button on the modem. This is a royal pain especially considering I have roommates who I have to troubleshoot for, who have to wait if I am not home, and who are paying me for their share of internet.

3) If in the troubleshooting process, the modem is unplugged & plugged back in, our computers would get a message when trying to access the internet asking us to “set up your new Bell account!” before we can get online again. Again, I’m the one who has to troubleshoot for my roommates so if I am not home, they have to wait, and they are paying me for their share of the internet. Troubleshooting this requires me to dig around for account number, username, password, registration key, dry loop line, etc. Often this would not work, since my passwords and usernames were changed as “authorized” according to the automated emails, though they have no record of this (see #1 above).

3) After repeated phone calls to them to try to clear all this up, I suddenly started receiving voicemails from Bell every couple days over a period of a few weeks stating “sorry we missed you, please call to reschedule” because apparently I wasn’t home when their technicians arrived for “scheduled” installation appointments at my home. This was several months after installation was already completed. I did not need anything else installed, had not asked for anything else, and I called them repeatedly to tell them to stop sending technicians. They responded each time by saying they did not have any record of any scheduled appointments nor of any technicians being sent to my home at all. One day, I actually ran into a Bell technician at my front door and told him to go away and remove my address from their schedule.

Fed up, I called to cancel. It takes 30 days to take effect. They would not let me downgrade service to their cheapest plan for remaining month, and gave no reason why. I am not in a contract.

I am now looking forward to sending back their modem and getting them out of my life permanently. I’ve written down my cancellation code and will be watching my credit card for unauthorized payments to Bell, as I see from reviewing complaints that this has been a problem for others.

Just a thought.. since it is really strange to be getting service that they specifically don’t offer.. heh.

Their Internet service was horrible. It hardly ever connected, and when it did, it was at a very slow speed. They always pointed their finger at me as the source of the problem, as I *obviously* had a virus on my computer.

Their satellite service was worse. We had a defective card in our receiver (didn’t know it at the time), and the extended channels would “blank out” for extended periods of time with a message stating that we had to pay for that channel (which we were). Each call to their customer service would be the same thing, where they would re download our channels.

We tried this three times, and it didn’t fix a thing. I finally got fed up, and called again, where they started the same thing again. I told the tech that it wouldn’t work, just like it didn’t work the last three times, and he assured me that it would work, and if it didn’t it was my fault because I wasn’t thinking positively about it. It didn’t work. And oddly enough, I didn’t feel like it was my fault.

I then asked to talk to a supervisor, whereupon I told him about the three previous times that we tried the same bloody thing, none of which worked, and now the fourth time didn’t work either. He looked up our history and said that that was only the third time that they tried the same thing that did not work, and he outright called me a liar, all the time sidestepping the issue that they were not even trying to fix the real problem.

I was too furious for words, so I hung up, cooled off for a few minutes, then called to disconnect all of our services. THEN they offered to consider the possibility that there was a defective card, but I would not have stayed by then if the service was free.

For months after we quit Bell, we received cards with big eyed puppies saying how much Bell missed us, and how they hoped we would come back.

Not terribly bloody likely.