By Susan Drummond
On July 17, 2005, I left Canada to carry out academic research in the Middle East. When I returned from being away, on August 26, there was a message on my home phone from Rogers Wireless, indicating that they wanted to talk to me about my cell phone. It was late at night. I went to sleep. And I called Rogers as soon as I awoke the next day.
The Customer Service Representative who took my call reviewed my file and asked me whether I was aware that there were over $12,000 worth of charges on my account. As I had not yet had a chance to open my mail, including my Rogers Wireless bill, she explained to me that a phenomenal number of phone calls had been made to Pakistan, Russia, Libya, India, and the UK (as well as to local numbers in the Greater Toronto Area) between July 16 and August 16. I told her that I had been away and that someone had clearly stolen my cell phone, which I had left behind in Toronto. I was then informed that I was responsible for the total charges owing on a lost or stolen cell phone, right up until the moment that I reported it missing (which would have been that moment 10 seconds earlier in our phone conversation - 11 days after the calls had stopped).
And that's when my experience with Rogers Wireless began.
I started a daily, then weekly, and then monthly process of disputing those charges. As time went by, I was not only getting no relief, but things were escalating. I continued to receive astronomical monthly invoices. The figure Rogers claimed I owed kept getting larger as Rogers tacked a whopping late penalty onto bills they claimed were overdue - bills that I maintained were in dispute. Rogers began sending notes to the credit bureaus indicating that I had missed payment on a substantial charge and my credit rating took a hit.
As days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months and there appeared to be no relief in sight, my parnter, Harry Gefen, a journalist, decided to amplify his investigational efforts, after numerous Rogers' representatives he had managed to speak to in person or on the phone kept telling him things that just did not seem credible:
When Harry asked about about the fraud detection protocols Rogers had in place, a Customer Service Representative (CSR) told Harry that Rogers only conducted random spot checks to see whether consumers were experiencing atypical call patterns; in response to a question about why Rogers was insisting on claiming its profit margin on the fraudulently incurred charges, another CSR assured Harry that Rogers made no profit at all on long distance phone calls.
It seemed apparent that Rogers' efforts to extract payment from a consumer was leading them to be inventive with the truth. In order to get a less "interested" version of things, Harry realized that he might need to catch Rogers speaking to a different audience about their operations.
Through his research, Harry found out that Rogers' Manager of Fraud and Security was going to be speaking to a specialized audience of fraud investigators at the Toronto Fraud Forum about the very topic in which my account was embroiled: cell phone theft and cell phone fraud.
He attended the conference and, while speaking to Rogers' Fraud Manager on the break following her presentation, he uncovered a fascinating story about how Ted Rogers' own cell phone had been cloned by a group linked to Hezbollah. It was this story that stimulated media interest in our experiences; and it appears as though it was the media storm around that story that provided us with some immediate relief in the form of a phone call from Ted Rogers himself.
Mr. Rogers apologized to me unreservedly, zero'd my bill, and offered to pay for our costs and the time that we had expended on investigating and battling his company for relief. Mr. Rogers went on to accept an invitation to my home to discuss with us some of the other newsworthy stories that we had uncovered in our investigations. He was, he said, determined to get to the root causes of the problem in order to improve service to his consumers.
That rendezvous, scheduled for February 6, 2006 at 2:30 PM, was aborted by Mr. Rogers at the 11th hour. We had organized a time well in advance around Mr. Rogers' schedule. We had also indicated to Mr. Rogers that we considered the meeting to be private and would exclude the media and refrain from either recording or transmitting our conversation. Mr. Rogers responded favourably to these overtures.
On February 6, Mr. Rogers' scheduling assistant, followed by Rogers' Vice President of Corporate Communications, called us to tell us that Mr. Rogers wouldn't be coming and that if we still wanted to meet Mr. Rogers, we would need to come to Rogers' corporate head offices or talk to him on the phone.
We had intended, at that afternoon tea, to discuss our travails, to make recommendations for improved service, and to resolve the legal dispute that was scheduled for a pre-trial conference on March 1, 2006 at Toronto Small Claims Court - the full trial is scheduled for early September, 2006.
The following web site is dedicated to both laying out parts of my experiences with Rogers, posting recommendations for improved customer service at Rogers, and inviting other consumers to share their troubled experiences with Rogers and submit their own consumer recommendations.
Until Mr. Rogers takes up his commitment to come to my home for tea, this web site will be a forum for Rogers consumers to have tea without Ted.
As Mr. Rogers told us several times in his correspondence to us: "I am keen to hear of your experience with our company and learn from it." (Ted Rogers, February 9, 2006)
The Whole Story: Table of Contents