Ordering Verizon FIOS, Part IIGo here for background. So I received an email from Verizon telling me I needed to call in to verify my identity. I called in and got a woman on the phone in short order. She explained to me that they needed to verify my identity, and that I was under no obligation to give them my SS#. That was good, so she asked me permission to look at some Experian database to verify my identity. I told her to go ahead. This is where things get interesting. She told me that I had a fraud alert put on my account, which I do. It’s from the company Debix. It’s a service I pay for to make sure that unauthorized people do not have access to my credit report. So Verizon wasn’t verifying my identity. They wanted to see my credit report. But they wouldn’t acknowledge this. I told her that she didn’t need my credit report to verify my identity, and that that wasn’t the proper way to verify my identity in the first place. I explained to her that I own the property, and that can be easily verified online with the register of deeds by visiting www.masslandrecords.com. She responded by saying she didn’t have Internet access. I tried to ask her why my credit card number and billing address, which match the location where service is to be installed, is not enough. She didn’t have an answer, other than to repeat that I hadn’t verified my identity. I asked her why she needed to verify my identity. I tried to explain to her that I spent more at Amazon this Christmas season than I will spend with Verizon in a whole year, and with Amazon I shipped goods all over the country. Yet Amazon doesn’t require my SS# or run credit checks on me. After all, I gave them a valid credit card number, and am able to verify the billing address. She didn’t seem to get my point, but she offered to have a supervisor call me back, which I accepted. In any event, I recorded the conversation on my iPhone while having her on speakerphone. I’ll post it later. But my guess is I’m not going to wind up getting Fios. |
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