Adam M Gaffin <adamg@world.std.com> (08/10/90)
{Middlesex News}, Framingham, Mass., 8/10/90
By Adam Gaffin
NEWS STAFF WRITER
State officials want MCI Telecommunications Corp. to explain why
a growing number of residents have apparently had their long-distance
service switched to MCI without their permission.
The state Department of Public Utilities now gets an average of
one complaint a day, and most of them are about MCI, department
Commissioner Bernice McIntyre said Thursday. She said some people were
apparently signed up for MCI after ``confusing statements'' from MCI
solicitors that made it sound as if they were answering a
questionnaire, not ordering a new type of phone service.
``It's definitely an MCI-related problem,'' McIntyre said, adding
complaints started in early 1989, when the company began an aggressive
marketing effort.
MCI officials could not be reached for comment yesterday, but
said recently that if unauthorized switching is happening, it is by
mistake and represents only isolated cases. Colleen Broderick, a
manager at MCI corporate headquarters in Washington, D.C., said
recently that the company would not want the ill will and bad
publicity caused by deliberately switching people against their
wishes.
McIntyre and other state utilities regulators will meet with MCI
officials on Tuesday to discuss unauthorized switching, known in the
industry as ``slamming.'' McIntyre will also ask the company to
continue its current practice of not charging residents for any
long-distance calls they made while unknowingly tied to MCI.
Kathie Kneff, chief of the Federal Communications Commission's
informal-complaints division, said most of the unauthorized-switching
complaints she has seen in recent months from across the country are
about MCI.
New England Telephone, which actually makes the change in a
customer's long-distance service, requires companies to obtain written
authorization, but never asks to see it unless a customer complains,
spokeswoman Roberta Clement has said.
Rod Oehley of Hopkinton said he was called by MCI saleswomen
three times in June and that each time he told them he did not want to
switch. When he got a letter from MCI a month later, he said, he
assumed it was just another plea and threw it out. But he learned it
was actually a bill when he got a demand notice a week after that
threatening to have his bill turned over to a collection agency if he
did not pay up for some long-distance calls.
Oehley said he called MCI, where he got a supervisor who agreed
to switch his service back to AT&T but still demanded his money -
until he threatened to call the Attorney General's office. ``I haven't
heard from them since,'' he said.
``If I get a bill I intend to do the same thing,'' Gene Buchman
of Framingham said. Buchman said he was called by an MCI solicitor
twice. ``I basically told them to get lost,'' he recalled. Then, he
got a letter from New England Telephone telling him his switch from
AT&T to MCI had been successfully completed.