How strange....I’ve had Verizon for my cell phone for over 5 years and have never had a biling problem in that entire time.
The company paid for it, within reason, so I took a $100 a month contract for 1400 minutes, anytime. I think the most I ever used was about 450 minutes in a month, and about 300 was probably the average. There were penalties for going over, but no one I knew ever busted their minutes with this plan.
Like clockwork, once a year Verizon "changed/updated their billing software", and all hell broke loose. My bill, after taxes, fees, OwlGore's internet to the masses tax, and all the federally mandated FCC foo-foo ran about $130. I would be billed the same thing to the penny for 11 or 12 months in a row. Then I would get a bill for at least $300, sometimes almost $500.
As posters stated, you could spend hours trying to find someone to correct it. Inevitably, the first, second, and third people you could talk to in the billing department would argue with you for hours that they billed perfectly, and that I owed all the money. They were TOTALLY impervious to faxed in copies of past bills, or my contract, or examining all the electronic versions of that on their system. "Please pay up, sir!"
Eventually, if you could escalate this problem up to someone with a brain, you could get it fixed. But by this time it might be two or three months of bad billing, and the credit they finally put on my bill was sometimes north of $1,000. And they were a MAJOR pain to deal with.
Sometime 6 or 7 years ago, all this stopped. Just short of me dropping their service, even though you can get a cell phone call practically anywhere I've ever been, in the US of A.