
Several years ago my wife graduated to a smart phone. I stayed with the flip. When she bought it there was a service package attached to it. If she signed up with T-Mobile, there was this pay-as-you-go deal that was pretty good for its time. So she bought into it. T-Mobile provided the connection, but they passed on the billing to a company called Vesta. So, we got a bill from Vesta_T-Mobile every month. Wife was perfectly happy with the "unlimited" service while I stuck with Virgin Mobile for about half the price. Then again, I used my phone about 1/10th as much as she used hers.
On Cyber Monday I bought the Pixel. A couple weeks later it was delivered and was ready to go live with it, but Virgin Mobile didn't have an obvious way to make the switch. They were heavily into iPhone. But then I found a deal with T-Mobile where wife and I could have a joint account for less than any of the local competitors I looked at. The only glitch was that she had to change phone numbers. They could not move her old account over to the new joint account. I would have complained more but the price was right.
Life went on and we both are enjoying T-Mobile as much as anybody could enjoy such a thing. Today, I happened to be looking over my Chase credit card mobile app to see if something I did not receive yet was billed. I noted that there was a pending charge from Vesta_T-Mobile waiting to be posted. That's the account that was eliminated when we made the switch. It turns out that Vesta never stopped billing even though the service had stopped. Further research revealed that they are doing this a lot and also scamming AT&T people the same way. So, we called the credit card folks who gave us credit for the two past charges but could not credit us for the one pending. Apparently it's only "pending" and not on their books. Thus it can't be removed until it gets posted. WTF?
This will all be resolved when the charge does get posted, tomorrow. All we need to do is call the credit card people AGAIN, and explain what happened. We talked about companies not wanting to do their own bookkeeping because it adds a cost to the process. Well, here's a case where T-Mobile is having somebody else do their billing and their former customers are getting screwed. The problem is with Vesta, and not T-Mobile, which doesn't make it less frustrating. But I missed it for nearly three months and Vesta is perfectly happy billing me for something I'm not getting anymore.