I have read lots of complaints on this site about Comcast's lousy service, bait and switch pricing policies and deceptive sales practices. All in all it paints a picture of a company culture that rewards incompetence and cares more about acquiring new customers than taking care of the customers they already have.

My story is about outright corporate theft! We cancelled our Comcast digital voice account by phone on March 10th 2009, and returned the hardware March 24 2009 to the Hayward California facility. We have the receipt. Despite this cancellation Comcast continued to bill us for the Digital Voice service on the April statement. We contacted Comcast by phone May 9th and was assured the account would be cancelled, the amount in question would be credited and a supervisor would call to confirm.

You can probably guess what happened next: we received no call from a supervisor, and the account was once again billed on the May statement. We contacted Comcast on 5/21 and talked to 4 representatives, the last was a supervisor who said he couldn't help us. Each of the reps we talked to referred us to the cancellation department, which of course you cannot dial directly, so we were transferred telephonically and then were forced to sit in call hold hell for a total of nearly an hour. Each time we were disconnected without ever talking to a rep.

I suppose that when the June bill comes we will still be billed for digital voice service we no longer receive. Because we pay by an automatic debit from our checking account, Comcast is, in essence, helping themselves to $50.00 of our money every month while refusing to rectify the situation. Taking money from someone without providing anything of value in return is theft, which is a crime whether it's an individual who perpetrates it or a massive soulless corporation.

We posted a letter to the corporate VP of customer support at Comcast - here's that link if anyone wants to try it.

http://www.comcastsupport.com/forms/contact/RickGermano/Default.aspx

Because there is little in the way of any real competition, we are still Comcast cable TV subscribers. Our next move would be to cancel the automatic debit bill payment from our checking account. We certainly learned our lesson there.

I say "we" throughout this missive, but it was basically my wife who was pursuing this. She is a customer support manager for a small health technology firm and knows the ins and outs of how customer support works. She insisted on handling this in the belief that a calm, cool and professional approach would get results. She made all the calls as if she were dealing with a company that took customer support seriously (like her company does). After the last contact with Comcast she was nearly in tears. So now I'm trying to take care of this. I am not nearly as controlled and businesslike about things like this as she is. If I have to call Comcast, someone's ears are going to get blown off.

Comcast has been basically stealing around $50.00 a month from us. We have taken efforts to stop this, but the behavior continues. Comcast would have me arrested and take steps to ruin my credit rating if I tried pulling a similar stunt on them.