If you ever have to go through a similar situation, know that you will be treated like a criminal by AT&T for a problem that they caused. And they will not doing anything in haste to try and fix the problem. The responses have been extremely rude and not helpful at all.
My husband and I went into escrow on a new home on February 10, 2015, and our credit reports were run by our mortgage broker. A surprise showed up on my credit history that was not there 6 months ago. Apparently AT&T was taking me to collections for $59.41 and had transferred the debt to a 3rd party collection agency in Florida. What???? I have lived in Hawaii for 10+ years and my phone number is in Hawaii. We have never missed a payment in my 10+ years with AT&T and my account balance is paid in full every month. We also never received any collections notices. If we did, I would have looked into it immediately. So now, my credit score has dropped 160 points! 160 points because of this. And we are in danger of losing the house and a portion of our down payment. We're buying a home in Hawaii, so that amount of cash that would be lost is not trivial.
We have spent days, not hours, and almost all on east coast time, trying to address this with AT&T. We get passed from Customer Service to Collections and then to the Fraud Department. And then the cycle starts over again and again. They are claiming that I have another account in Florida, with an e-mail that is not mine, an address that is not mine and that I have never lived at, and phone numbers that are not ours and in a different area code. The Florida account was closed in Feb 2014 and collections started on it in Oct 2014. But somehow AT&T didn't do their due diligence to recognize that I had a long-standing, and the only authorized account, in Hawaii, and they could have contacted me there? So instead they screw you and send something that you had no idea about to collections which gets reported to all 3 credit bureaus. That is permanent damage. AT&T would not give us the information on the collections account (AT&T account number, Name, address, phone number, etc.), so we had to spend days getting that info from the third party collection agency. And then call AT&T back and give it to them. Really?
We have had to file police reports and submit them to the 3rd party collection agency in Florida so that they can start the process of removing this from my credit record. AT&T still fails to recognize the problem. All I need is a letter from AT&T stating that the Fraud department is investigating the other account and that my authorized account has no collections attempts being made on it. Good luck - they won't do it. So now we're facing all of this financial ruin over a stupid $59.41 that we had nothing to do with.
When you try to engage with the Fraud Department, the representatives will get defensive and annoyed and wave you off by telling you that they are looking into it and that you will receive a letter in the mail when they have something to tell you. Again - I was not even allowed to verify my account information so that I could guarantee that they would be sending the response to my correct address. They did not want to be bothered. You think I wanted to be bothered by all of this? Especially when it was a surprise and will cost us thousands of dollars if not resolved in the next week? Is AT&T going to compensate me for that loss? Or even apologize for all the mental anguish they have caused?
This has been an absolute nightmare.
I'm now expecting some automated response that will continue to get me knowhere.