:smack:
I saw the bill he received from QLT Consumer Lease Services.
God only knows what landfill these phones are at the bottom of. It must be 25 or 30 years since they were replaced.
Any sage advice for dealing with this?
to end the lease you need to return the phones or buy them.
since you can’t do one then do the other.
i recall that Bell maybe allowed you to buy your leased phone for about $80 when the requirement that all phones and wiring be leased from them had ended.
He’s been receiving bills for this for 25 to 30 years and just went ahead and paid them?
Hard to believe, but yes.
Call QLT Consumer Lease Services, report the loss of the phones, and say you want to discontinue the lease.
You will probably have to pay for the phones. But at least you will be done with them.
Yes, it’s horrible that your father paid for the phones for so long, but he neither returned them nor cancelled the lease.
How much is the lease and how much do you really want to deal with the phone company? If it’s just a few dollars it’s probably not worth the hassle of calling them up and dealing with it. Just ride it out and when you cancel the service someday hopefully that’ll be the end of it, but if they do attempt to send any kind of final bill or ask for the phones back tell them they can attempt to collect them from “the estate”, but I’d just ignore it. When you cancel the service don’t give them your phone number or address and they shouldn’t have any way to contact you to attempt to collect the debt and they’ll probably give up relatively easily.
Estate? Are you assuming his father is dead?
The current bill is $29.00 per quarter.
In defense of my dad, he pretty much just paid the bills while my mom made the household decisions. At whatever point in time that folks could just buy a phone at the local Wal-Mart, one of us kids probably bought a touch tone phone for them as a gift. My mom probably held on to the old phones “as backup”. Now fast forward thru the years and a series of cordless phones & pretty soon you have a box full of old telephones that gets thrown out.
I’ll call QLT tomorrow & put an end to it one way or another.
Did you read these posts:
http://www.consumerwarningnetwork.com/2009/03/25/is-grandmom-still-renting-her-old-telephone/
No, I’m assume he will be some day and that at his age he probably doesn’t want to go messing around with his phone bill, that’s why I said ‘just ride it out’.
That second link from PastTense makes it sound like you can just call up and cancel without too much of a hassle, though I would play the ‘dear old dad hasn’t had that phone in 10 years’ card. Also, I would do it from his house (with him around) to save the extra call in case they need any of his info that you don’t have on hand.
Thanks!
$116 per year seems well worth dealing with to me.
Call them up, tell them your mom returned the phones ten years ago, and your poor befuddled father has continued to pay their erroneous bills. Tell them you want the money returned or you will go the the press over this.
{yes, it’s a lie but it gives you a negotiation point}
After a few rounds of “no we didn’t”, “yes you did” you can tell them to just quit sending him the bills and call it even.
They will probably jump at the chance to clear out.
We gave my mother a push button phone as a gift, but she refused to pay the extra 18-cent monthly surcharge to the phone company for touchtone.
This is a really great suggestion.
Fraud is usually a terrible suggestion.
Usually, but in this case, the telephone company has charged $116 / yr for 25 years, around $3000. Were the phones under discussion returned, their current value to the telephone company is $0, anyway. (Perhaps less, as they’d have to pay staff to deal with the physical phones once returned.) So this “fraud” isn’t actually costing the phone company anything, since the actual phones are now valueless as a phone company product, and the company has practiced unethical billing. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but this seems more like a white lie than fraud.
I’m curious, what specifically did QLT Consumer Lease Services do that was unethical?
Price-gouging.
Once a lessor has paid more than a few hundred percent of a product’s total value, an ethical business will re-examine the terms. I don’t know where that line is, but assuming the phones cost $300, the consumer has paid 1000% of their value, something the telephone company was in a position to know.
Here, it sounds like the initial lease continued automatically with no review. The consumer bears most of the repsonsibility here, but I do think this situation goes beyond caveat emptor. The phone company chose not to set limits in order to maximize profits.
Note: this is just an opinion. I’m no expert in business ethics.
If the customer said, “hey, I don’t want this anymore” and the phone company refuses to cancel the lease, sure. If the customer blindly sends a check every month, not the company’s fault.