And finally…Man’s home buying ambitions jeopardised by $2m mobile phone bill

VerizonAn American family could be in danger of losing out on their dream home because a bungling telephone company has saddled them with an erroneous bill for $2 million!

Ken Slusher, from the American state of Oregon, was told he owes mobile firm Verizon the incomprehensible amount despite only having a contract with them for one month.

Slusher and his girlfriend bought a pair of phones from Verizon last November but cancelled the service after just four weeks due to billing issues.

Slusher said their first bill should have been for about $120. Instead, it was for $698 and showed a previous balance of $451.



Slusher said the next statement asked for just $9.

“The number of errors and the comedy of which they happened is astounding to me,” he said.

However, the issues didn’t stop there –they got a lot worse.

Slusher then began receiving letters from collection agencies, compelling him to check his Verizon account balance.

It was then that he heard the rather disturbing grand total of $2,156,593.64.

Scheduled to close on a new house Monday, Slusher said his mortgage company will not sign off on the loan he needs because the collection agencies are hounding him.

“Yeah, it’s been very stressful to say the least,” Slusher said. “The number of errors and the comedy of which they happened is astounding to me.”

“If I don’t get this straightened out in the next 24 hours, I can almost guarantee I’ll lose my house,” he added.

However, Verizon said the error has been resolved.

“We have apologized to an Oregon customer for a programming error in an automated voice response system,” Verizon said in a statement. “The error caused him to receive an incorrect voice message that he owed $2 million on his bill. We are correcting the error now and have resolved the issue to his satisfaction.”

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