@brockcockrell wrote:
AT&T Mobility (through Prince Parker Assoc) put a collection on my account for $240 for an unpaid mobile phone bill.
They sent me emails asking me to pay last summer after I transfered my service to Consumer Cellular. I didn't think I owed this because I paid my last bill, but wanted to make sure.
So I tried to log in to my account and it wouldn't open. I chatted with the AT&T chat support system and the person said they couldn't find any bill for me and they suggested I call the billing support line. Then I called them and spoke with another support person who couldn't find that I owed any money and that I no longer even had an account to pay on. They suggested I go into an ATT store. I did that and they couldn't find anything either and said to just ignore it.
Well, I did what they said and now I have a collection on it, which dropped my credit score 36 points. It was given to Prince Parker on March 24, 2026 and the Status is listed as "Unpaid."
This is my only collection account. How should I handle this?
In my opinion, when you leave AT&T they're very likely to "make up" something you "owe" them and stick it on your credit report and they've been like this for many years.
In 2005, they bought Cingular Wireless and I became their customer that way. When I discontinued, they charged me a $500 "early termination" that was not in the Cingular contract. Eventually they sent it to "AFNI" collection agency and put it on my credit report.
I was so mad that I listed AFNI as a bankruptcy creditor 15 years later, in 2020, even though I hadn't heard of it since they contacted me in 2014 (5 years after the statute of limitations in that state and years after it was off my credit report) offering to "settle" it.
I had ripped up that paper and threw it in the garbage where it belonged.
Then a few years ago, mom ditched AT&T and even though she ported out both numbers, they continued charging her for my brother's line, which didn't have a phone number because it was ported out. Porting out "should" make that line get cancelled the minute you do it, like what happened when I left T-Mobile for Mint Mobile, but AT&T told my mom "Oh you never said you wanted to cancel the secondary line."
They turned her over to some "AI" based collection company, and she had me help her with disputing it, so I sent "put up or shut up" letters to the bureaus and that collection troll couldn't back any of that up, so it fell off her three bureaus.
When you leave AT&T, it seems, in my observation and opinion, the only value you have left is for them to lie and say you owed them something you don't owe them, and they turn you over to collections on it real fast because they sell "bad debt" that they made up and lied about for a certain amount of money then it ends up on your credit report and then it's "your problem". They can't actually provide any evidence you owe it in my obervation and as soon as you dispute it and say "Where's the evidence?" it falls off.
Their store people are also incompetent and maybe even crooked. There was one case where they put her debit card on their autopay and she was making their phone payments until she filed fraud disputes with her bank.
I got into it with an AT&T salesman at CostCo a few weeks ago. I told him AT&T is a "horrible company" and that "they rip people off" and that I would "never do business with AT&T".
