You had better wait before you look at Dish, I was just notified that Dish is going up next month. They didn’t say how much so I will just wait and see.
Points:
1. We were a customer of DirecTV for five years and always paid our bill.
2. We sold our Wisconsin home in November 2005 and moved to Las Vegas .
3. My wife called DirecTV and cancelled our service in Nov 2005. DirecTV’s rep kept pressuring her to “suspend” the service. She insisted that it be cancelled since we were moving into an apartment and would have cable.
4. All 3 DirecTV satellite receivers were placed in a box and put in storage when we moved.
5. DirecTV (Without our knowledge or permission) “turned on” our service for our Wisconsin home) in July 2006. Bills were sent to our former address in Wisconsin and were never received by us. A DirecTV representative told me in January 2007 that after not receiving a payment from us, DirecTV turned off our service for 1 month and then in a gesture of good faith turned it back on for several more months before finally turning it off for good in November 2006.
6. We became aware of this bill when we received a collections agency notification in January 2007.
7. DirecTV was contacted by me twice in January 2007. Letters were sent by certified mail to both the collections agency and DirecTV
8. In order for our older DirecTV satellite receivers to work, they must be hooked to a phone line. These receivers must phone in once per month in order to receive instructions on what channels we are allowed to receive and to get the code to decrypt the satellite signal. DirecTV could have easily verified with their computers that our receivers never called in and thus know that we never used their services.
It is now 2009 and we just hired a lawyer because we just got another collections agency notice.
Pretty cool way to make extra money. Turn on our service for a house we no longer own and we live 1,700 miles away. Even better after receiving no payment is to turn it back on and then try to charge us for even more months.