British Expatriate Network

... by Acceris, Worldxchange.

A heads up for anyone else who this may happen to. On saturday 14th Jan. we received our SBC monthly statement. Included was a page for Worldxchange Communications and their charge of $13.81 for my long distance calls.

However... we did not have a long distance carrier, or so we thought, I always use a 'dial around' type of service. Up to July 2005 I did use the Acceris number but only as a 'dial up', they were never set up as my automatic long distance provider. Since August I have used 'Primus' as my dial up because they had a better deal for me.

So what happened? Well through conversations with SBC and Primus I have learned all about 'slamming', the practice of a company making themselves your long distance carrier without your permission. This practice can happen because the phone companies by law have to leave your line open to this possibility so that you can assign a long distance carrier without the local company's permission.

SBC are now sending me an 'anti-slamming' form which means that I will give them permission to 'close' our lines to this possibility. They are returning the Acceris charges to Acceris so then it will be up to Acceris to come after us themselves if they feel the charges were correctly applied. SBC tell me that if I had asked Acceris to be my long distance carrier I would have had to do it via paperwork or verbally through a third party on the phone... neither of which I did of course.

So I would advise all of us who use dial around numbers to take the precaution of contacting your local phone provider and asking for the anti-slamming form.

I have nothing but praise for the customer service provided by Primus and SBC, the girl at Primus even set up a 3 way conference call with an SBC representative to sort this mess out, yes they actually called me back to ask how it was going too!

Hope this is helpful...

Graham

Highly illegal .

There is a system they are suppose to use if you change your long distance carrier .

After you call them and ask them to transfer your service a * supervisor *calls you back confirming the call and thus making a record of it .

Thankfully we dont get that problem anymore as we have only cell phones in this house all land lines have been disconnected .

That's why you should have Broadband phone! I thought slamming was old hat but it seems not.

I bet they resolved it because they can be fined quite a bit of cash for that kind of scam.

I would if Verizon would release their grip on (a) forcing us to have DSL if we have local landline service and (b) the 231 area code which Vonage has been trying to get - according to them anyway - for years now.

I use our cellphones for all long distance calls, but unfortunately still have to pay the long distance tariffs to Verizon for a service we don't use.

The landline phone system needs a tad more deregulation in this country.

We don't use cell phones at all at the moment. Have to say that I am happy with the landline service and with 'dial-up' numbers for my long distance I am paying 4.5 or 5 cents per minute... so usually about $12 a month which gets me a weekly call to my daughter and mum with plenty of time to talk.

I posted this as a heads up to other landline number dialers of course. Quality wise it is usually perfect.

No, really we should have far better consumer protection in this country. But I guess that might hurt "business"