Contributor
Where is my parents $13,000 Overpayment?
My elderly parents accidentally made a $13,000+ overpayment through their online bill payer. My mother called as soon as she saw her bank account and was told by DIRECTV Billing that they would expedite the return of the overpayment in 3-5 business days. It's been a week and the money has not been returned. My parents have tried to call the billing account and the people in your call center (Philippines?) Keep hanging up on them. My parents have had Directv for over 20 years. In a time when Directv is hemorrhaging customers, I don't think you want the bad press that Directv has stolen $13,000+ from Senior Citizens. I don't think the Department of Justice would like to hear that Directv has joined the Silver fraud team. We have tried finding a telephone number to Directv corporate - nothing. Please provide us with a contact telephone number of someone who can rectify this situation before we have to take it the Attorney General and/or the Department of Justice. Not to mention the media.
Juniper
ACE - Expert
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23K Messages
6 years ago
A manual refund request is normally review and approved/denied within 10 business days by their finance department. With millions of customers there is not really a way to get this expidited. Though that amount should be quickly approved once its turn comes around as that would be a very obvious overpayment.
What you can do that might help is DirecTV has a dispute form for payment issues: www.directv.com/paymentdispute
One thing to keep in mind as if by online bill payer you mean an entity other than DirecTV (such as the bank if they have a bill pay option), is that this would be a 3rd party payment that may take up to 3 business days before it posts on the DirecTV account even if it already drafted from the bank account.
This is not a matter of DirecTV stealing but processing time for payment to post on their end, being reviewed by finance department (which is done in order of requests submitted), and finally refund back to bank with their processing time to post to account. Unfortunately it is not as quick a turnaround as you would like, which is understandable considering that amount. But hopefully it completes on the sooner side of the process. Good luck.
If their personal finances allow, I would suggest auto bill pay with DirecTV so that only the exact amount of the bill goes through to avoid this kind of situation.
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kalynk
Contributor
6 years ago
My mom called to check on this after a week; however, when they checked on the account they said it wasn't set up to refund it was set up to pay her bill out of this amount. And when she asked to talked to a supervisor about it, they hung up on her. I also found out this morning that the amount of the over payment was actually $14,376.78 and the money was taken out of her account on 8/21. So, they had plenty of time to know this was an over payment and start the refund process.
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kalynk
Contributor
6 years ago
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Juniper
ACE - Expert
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23K Messages
6 years ago
Though that is an extremely large amount, they may not be set to automatically flag large amounts of any amount threshold. So payments are accepted as made, and there are people who choose to pay months ahead of time to leave a rolling credit balance (though I think it is silly).
So the 10 business days would be from when the agent made a refund request, not the payment being made. However it sounds like the request may not have been submitted in the first place, so I would suggest using the dispute form to get this going. Hope that gets everything processing as it should.
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