Four months after his death, Bell is still charging the deceased Edward Lupien for a cellular service, his daughter having been unable to cancel his cellphone account, reports CBC News.
Edward Lupien’s daughter, Jill Druken, says she has spent hours speaking with Bell’s customer service. She sent the required documents in twice, but the bills are still arriving. She initially asked Bell to cancel the cellphone account in her father’s name a couple days after he passed away last November. But the carrier continues to help itself to her father’s bank account.
“The little bit of money that’s been put aside to put a tombstone on [the] grave … Bell is helping themselves to that money and it’s not theirs to take,” Druken told CBC Radio’s On the Go on Wednesday. “I’m just not willing to let this go.”
She was recently assured by Bell that the problem would be fixed, but she’s not trusting Bell anymore, not until the problem is fixed.
“I’ve been receiving bills from Bell, and they’ve been continuing to help themselves to his bank account,” she said on Wednesday.
After sharing her outrage on Facebook, she has found she isn’t the only one with this problem: plenty of others are dealing with similar problems.
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Former employee here. Bell has a really terrible process for dealing with deceased clients. There’s like three layers of bureaucracy between the customer service rep and the team that actually cancels the account. You gotta call a manager (who’s not really a manager, just a team of people who pretend to be a manager when someone asks to speak to one), then they call someone else, who files a request using a web form that only works on Internet Explorer.
Once the request is made, it takes 2-3 business days for the admin team to handle the request. However, there are any number of reasons why the offline team might reject the request. Most of the time its rejected because of a typo, such as wrong account number, wrong client ID number, or wrong CTN. And those are just a few of many fields that must be filled in correctly.
If the request is rejected the original customer service rep gets no notification. The only way to find out the request was accepted or rejected is for the customer to call back and have someone else look it up.
If this Jill lady calls in a few more times and maybe yells at a manager or two, she will eventually get this rectified. But this is completely normal: I remember handling an account where it took over a year before the deceased account got closed. Bureaucracy and Bell go hand in hand, like pigs and ****.
Bell is an awful company to deal with . I am not impressed with them they are trying to charge me money for a phone I never even? got from them or even touched from them. They want me to pay $900.00 even though I cancelled with them on time it’s a night mare and a cold company to deal with. I am so glad I am back with my main provider . I would never trust bell again … They are so rude and don’t appreciate their customers only money they take …
They need to contact CBC’s Go Public or Marketplace.
I feel like if the Cell carriers want more favourable rules from the CRTC, they need to stop pulling sh!t like this.
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Terrible. Bell at its finest. This is another great reason to never allow a company direct access to your account.
Don’t allow automatic debits from your bank account. If you want auto payment, do it with a credit card. In the case of death, when e credit card is canceled, no further auto payments would take place. No need to fight to get money back.
Notify the bank that withdrawals are not permitted. Terminate to auto debit agreement? This way it stops coming from the bank account while getting Bell to resolve it.
Its not that easy. Give your account info to anyone and they can debit any amount at any time. Hard for bank to stop. Too many possible sources.