A medical missionary is upset about nearly $1,600 in Honduras-based cellular telephone charges for which he claims he isn’t responsible.
William Davis was a volunteer administrator for Sight to the Blind Inc. during a May 12-June 12 trip to Honduras.
AT&T Cingular says the Grove resident made $1,575.26 in phone calls during that period, Davis said. The problem, he said, is his Motorola cell phone was turned off that entire time.
“This is just a nightmare situation,” he said. “I just hope that if this gets some notice, it won’t happen to somebody else.”
Since 1988, Davis has escorted optometrists and ophthalmologists to developing countries to provide eye care and surgery to low-income patients. In 1992, he and Robert Searle, then a Pittsburg, Kan., ophthalmologist, founded the nonprofit Sight to the Blind in Grove.
“There are a lot of people like myself who go to Honduras and all around the world to different countries and make sacrifices to help other people,” he said. “To have something like this happen while you’re there, they need to know about it.”
Davis said he was incorrectly billed $1,444.14 on June 29 and $131.12 on July 29 for international roaming charges. The company charged him $2.51 per minute for phone calls to numbers that Davis said he’s unfamiliar with.
Davis did use a cell phone while in Honduras, but it was a Nokia phone for which he purchased prepaid phone cards, he said.
He kept his Motorola phone in a suitcase and the phone’s charger in a separate laptop computer bag.
“If they would have stolen it, they would have kept it,” he said. “This is a very poor country. A Motorola phone would have been sold on the black market.”
Davis has filed complaints with the Federal Communications Commission and the Better Business Bureau, he said.
He said AT&T Cingular has told him that its system is “infallible” and that “those calls had to have been made from my phone.”
The company has offered to reduce his bill by half, meaning that Davis has to come up with about $800 by Thursday or risk losing his cell-phone service, he said.
Davis, who is diabetic and has no health insurance, said he might have to hold a garage sale to try to pay the bill.
“To a lot of people who make big bucks and go to casinos and stuff like that, $800 is just petty cash,” said Davis, a University of Tulsa graduate who has a degree in accounting. “But to me, this is a lot of money.”
Lauren Elmore, an information specialist with the Better Business Bureau, urges people with disputes over phone bills to file a complaint with the BBB and also review their credit report.
If a company doesn’t respond to a complaint or a reasonable solution can’t be reached, customers can seek relief in small claims court, she said.
By RHETT MORGAN
