Felt like I got scammed - mobility promotion turned into $347 in 5 weeks
TLDR - If you're thinking of activating a Telus mobility account because of an attractive promotion - DON'T. It's a waste of time and money. Hidden fee's and headaches.
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I got a call about 5 weeks ago from Telus about a new mobility promotion. He asked what my current plan was. With Public Mobile I was getting 50GB CAN-USA-MEX for $35/month. They laughed that off and said they could do much better at 100GB for $35/month. They conveniently left out that it was CAN only, a detail I found out after agreeing to move forward - yes that was my mistake.
We agreed to set up two lines. I told them upfront my device is eSIM only. They mailed two physical SIMs anyway. Getting that corrected cost me about 4 hours on the phone across multiple calls.
I get my first bill which was $123 - they told me to expect it to be a bit higher due to "partial charges" and connection fees, but it would regulate to $35/month per line on the following bill. Then I get my next bill this week and it is $224... thats now $347 I've been billed in 5 weeks, how is that normal!?
I spend another couple hours on Telus support, including a unhelpful and rude chat agent who basically didnt say anything other than "the billing is correct". A phone agent was more polite but said the same thing — except they found a $24 "error," bringing it down to $200...
I told them I wanted to cancel - they set me up with a cancellation callback but also mentioned I could just join another provider and it would auto cancel my telus plan.
The cancellation callback immediately reversed the $200 bill to $70+tax.
I'm so exhausted y'all. The promotion felt deceptive, the telus app and online is painful to use, the billing seems intentionally confusing, and the support service was a nightmare (minus a couple of kind phone support workers). I was going to move back to Public but I can't stand paying Telus anything so I'm switching to Freedom instead.
If you get a cold call from Telus with a mobility promotion: get every detail in writing before agreeing to anything, confirm your SIM type explicitly, and know that your first two bills will likely bear no resemblance to what you were quoted.