from the customer-service dept
About five or six years ago, I had landline phone service from MCI. In the age before VoIP was common, MCI had a service called "The Neighborhood" which was like many VoIP services today, but without the VoIP part. Unlimited calls for a single flat rate and such advanced (at the time!) features as emailing you your voicemails. It wasn't a bad deal, and I used it for a year or two, until I was getting ready to move. VoIP services had become popular, so I transferred that phone line to a VoIP account and canceled the MCI service in 2004. And that was that. Or so I thought. In 2006, Verizon bought what was left of a scandal-ridden MCI, and as far as I knew, the MCI brand had pretty much gone away.
Yet, in the last couple of weeks, I've received a barrage of robocalls from MCI, letting me know that my credit card is expiring, and I need to log into mci.com to update the card. The call notes that my bill is automatically charged to this credit card and if I want to "continue enjoying this convenience" I need to update soon. The call is correct in that the credit card I used back when I had MCI expired this month, but is it that hard for Verizon (or whoever it is) to recognize that the very phone number they're calling me on hasn't been connected to MCI service in four years and that the company has not, in fact, billed me during that time? And, honestly, why did they hang onto my credit card info for so long? And, finally, why call me three times a day with no way for me to tell them to knock if off? I thought perhaps this was a new form of phishing, but the call directs you to log into mci.com itself, so it sounds like it's legit. Either way, it raises plenty of questions about MCI (and now Verizon's) data handling practices.
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