Watch it carefully anyhow, because their back office system “might be correcting salesman mistakes.”
Back in the days when AT&T was broken into Baby Bells, we went with Mid-Atlantic Bell [now transmogrified into Verizon.] One day, a guy I didn't even know on the other side of the mountain made a person-to-person long distance call to me for which I charitably accepted the charges, thinking it might be someone I knew a long time ago or something. He realized his mistake, apologized for the wrong number and hung up.
As a result of that call, AT&T hijacked my long distance service.
I fought with them for nearly a year. Each time I called them, they said I'd used their long-distance service and had to pay. Each time I told them accepting a person-to-person charge is not me using your service, it's some other person using your service that I'm agreeing to pay. They "relent" each time and tell me it'll be handled.
Each month, they add another $38.50 for non-payment of the outstanding bill. By the end of the year, I'm looking at almost $400 after being told each time it's taken care of. Each time, by the way, their very first offer was that if I simply agreed that AT&T was now my LD carrier, I would be forgiven my "debt" as an introductory offer.
I asked a lawyer who supplied legal services to one of my clients what he would charge to send them a letter. He agreed to charge me $30 to sign a letter on his letterhead if I typed it up. That finally stopped the dunning notices.
Interestingly, throughout this whole escapade, AT&T did not refer me to a collection agency.
So they knew what they were doing was bogus and wrong, and wouldn't take the steps they would've used to settle a legitimate delinquency, because that puts them in the tightly regulated consumer credit rights hell. I wonder how many people they convinced to just pay them off, or switch their LD service back to AT&T.
Interestingly about 10 years after this fiasco, I get fold-over card from some legal firm telling me I was the recipient of a settlement in a class action lawsuit against phone carriers for LD hijacking. My compensation? $100 worth of long distance from AT&T. WTF?! A card to use the LD service of the people who'd been screwing me? [And by then, LD was essentially free anyway.] The wicked never pay...