Linda Weatherbee was not interested in upgrading the ADT home security system in her elderly mother’s home in Maine when she got a call last winter from a cheery company salesman.
At the time, Weatherbee was preparing to sell her mother’s house and didn’t want to add new fees to an already-expensive $85-a-month security service that her mother never really fully understood how to operate.
But Weatherbee eventually warmed to the salesman’s offer to reduce the monthly fee by almost $50 if she agreed to an “upgrade” and switched automatic payments from her mother’s credit card to her own.
For Weatherbee, thus began eight months of nightmarish dealings with ADT, including six months of double-billing, two substantial surprise charges, and the company’s maddening requirements for a refund.
ADT, one of the world’s largest security companies, seemed to fail Weatherbee at just about every turn, until, after my involvement, it finally refunded Weatherbee about $1,500 late last month. It did so with what sounded to me like a half-hearted apology “for any oversight with your or your mother’s account.”
Weatherbee’s experience is a reminder that while automatic payments from your credit card for ongoing services or subscriptions are a nice convenience, they bear close monitoring. Two other consumer lessons that emerge from Weatherbee’s ordeal: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And get it in writing.
Here’s what happened:
Late last year, shortly after Weatherbee’s 91-year-old mother moved out of her home in Harrison, Maine, into an assisted living facility in Florida, Weatherbee received the sales call. She doesn’t know how the salesman got her telephone number.
The salesman seemed to have an answer for everything. The monthly service fee would drop from $84.69 to $35.86, with the same level of service, which included detection of any forced entries and any shut down of the heating and electrical systems.
ADT usually requires a 36-month contract, with a steep cancellation fee for early termination, but the salesman told Weatherbee she could cancel within six months with no cancellation fee. (Weatherbee expected to sell the house within six months.)
The salesman told Weatherbee there would be no upgrade fee — that the company simply wanted to change the operating panel already installed in her mother’s house. He made it seem like ADT wanted to do the upgrade for its own reasons and was willing to provide a $48.83 discount as an incentive, Weatherbee said.
“In retrospect, I should have known it was too good to be true,” she said. “I could have avoided all this hassle by just saying, ‘No thanks.’”
She also said she should have insisted on all the terms in writing to later prove her case with customer service representatives — “a mistake I’ll not make again.”
With Weatherbee’s agreement, the salesman closed her mother’s account and opened a new one in Weatherbee’s name. He and Weatherbee set a new “safe word” for the account, which ADT would require to shut off the alarm in the event it was inadvertently triggered by Weatherbee or another family member. Safe words protect against a burglar posing as a family member to call off an alarm, but are also for customer service account verification.
Automatic payments from Weatherbee’s credit card began almost immediately, but ADT continued to bill her mother’s credit card, which meant the combined monthly fee now exceeded $120.
“I contacted the salesman, and he said he’d fix it, but he didn’t,” said Weatherbee, who lives in Lancaster. ”This continued for the next six months, with me trying to reach someone at ADT to help and the salesman no longer responding.”
Then she got hit with a $390 upgrade fee. After Weatherbee lodged numerous complaints, the fee was inexplicably changed to $90, which Weatherbee said she paid to avoid more time-consuming back-and-forth with ADT.
Weatherbee and her sister sold the house in June and canceled the ADT service well within the six-month, no-fee period. But her credit card got dinged with a $943.87 charge. She persisted in calls to ADT in order to get that amount refunded, only to become totally demoralized a few weeks later when ADT again charged $943.87 on her credit card.
When Weatherbee called ADT she encountered various barriers. Sometimes, she was told the company could not locate her account, sometimes it could not locate her mother’s. More than once she was assured the matter would be straightened out and a refund posted to her credit card within 30 days, but nothing happened. She received multiple promises of call-backs that never came.
In August, an ADT representative finally agreed to refund Weatherbee about $1,500 to make up for the double billing and the errant cancellation fee. But then she encountered new obstacles.
To begin with, the ADT rep insisted the refund could only be paid by check, not credit card, despite the company’s months of transacting business on Weatherbee’s credit card.
“Why can’t you refund my credit card?” Weatherbee asked.
“Because the amount is too large,” the rep replied without further elaboration.
The rep said the check would be sent to an address for her mother that Weatherbee recognized as out of date. She asked that the check be sent to her own address in Lancaster or to her mother’s now-sold house in Maine (where the new owners were regularly forwarding mail to Weatherbee).
The ADT rep then demanded that Weatherbee cite her mother’s safe word, which had been replaced by Weatherbee’s new safe word.
“I told her I didn’t know what it was, that my mother has dementia so she doesn’t know what it is, and that I’d been using my own safe word for all my previous contacts with ADT,” Weatherbee said.
The rep then said she needed a copy of a power of attorney for her mother to change the address for the check, Weatherbee said.
Rather than send the power of attorney, a wary Weatherbee reached out to me.
“I keep getting conflicting stories and unkept promises and the reps won’t pass me on to a supervisor,” she wrote to me. “I’m not a troublemaker but I am at my wit’s end.”
In an email to ADT, I detailed what had happened as it was related to me by Weatherbee.
“This seems to me to be a classic example of the runaround,” I wrote.
I followed up the next day with a request for an accounting of payments ADT had received from Weatherbee and her mother. Within an hour, Weatherbee got a call from someone from ADT’s office of “Presidential Executive Response and Resolution,” which sounded to me like a highfalutin title for damage control.
The executive response team promised (and later provided) a full refund — on Weatherbee’s credit card. Nothing was said about mailing a check or a safe word or a power of attorney.
It just proves ADT — and plenty of companies like it — can do the right thing if a sufficient amount of pressure is applied.
Got a problem? Send your consumer issue to sean.murphy@globe.com. Follow him @spmurphyboston.