VIRGINIA BEACH - Imagine looking at your bank account, and finding hundreds of dollars missing! A Virginia Beach woman says Verizon charged her twice for the same bill, and now she’s fighting to get her money back.
When Irene Owens checked her bank account this week, she realized she was billed twice.
“Verizon had actually debited my account twice for $341.00,” she said.
Verizon admitted she wasn’t the only customer affected. A spokesperson sent 13News Now this statement:
“Earlier this week, a technical issue at one of the nation’s Federal Reserve Banks resulted in a limited number of Verizon Wireless customer payments being processed twice. To address this situation, the bank issued reversal files for the duplicated payments; each duplicated transaction is being reversed by the receiving financial institution, which should help ensure businesses and consumers are not negatively impacted by this incident. Verizon is apologizing to affected customers and directing them to their individual financial institutions to confirm that the transaction reversal is complete.”
When 13News Now posted her problem on Facebook, we got dozens of comments from people with the same issue. One person wrote, "Thank you for this information. Just checked my account and it was in fact double charged."
Owens wonders if the Verizon strike is at least partially to blame--saying she’s also experiencing more dropped calls since workers hit the picket line.
Verizon adamantly denied this claim saying, “The landline strike has no bearing on wireless operations. Wireless network technicians work on the wireless network, landline techs work on the landline network. While there could be an issue with, say, a fixed fiber connection going to a cell site that could affect wireless service on that one cell site, it would not cause ‘all’ of a customer’s calls to drop.”
Meantime, Owens says she’s still waiting for her bank account to be credited for a payment she didn’t owe.
“Sorry hasn't done anything for me when it came to double debiting payment-- and that payment still hasn't been credited back yet,” she said.