Vivint Responds to Claims of Charging Elderly Woman for Service She Never Used

A Vivint spokesperson gives the company’s side of the story.

SSI reached out for comment from Vivint about a story posted yesterday in which the company continued to make automatic withdrawals from an elderly woman’s checking account for nearly five years after repeated requests to cancel the alarm service.


READ THE ORIGINAL STORY: Vivint Charges Woman for 5 Years Worth of Cancelled Alarm Service, Finally Refunds


A Vivint spokesperson told SSI the original news story contained multiple inaccuracies and that the company attempted to resolve the account issue over a number of years. Vivint provided SSI the following list of measures the company claims to have made to close the woman’s account:

  • We would have canceled the account anytime Mrs. O’Neill was willing to provide her passcode, and we even sent the passcode to her on several occasions.
  • Mrs. O’Neill used the system much longer than two months – her first call to us after her 2007 installation was three years later in 2010. She said she was discontinuting her phone service and accepted our offer of a Go!Control panel (new technology at the time with a cellular connection). We tried reaching her multiple times to schedule the installation, both by phone and by mail, but without response. We didn’t hear from her again until 2012.
  • A security provider is legally and contractually obligated to provide service to customers until proper cancellation – whether or not the customer uses the system. Usage has no bearing on contractual obligations.
  • Requiring some form of account authentication, e.g., passcode, is standard practice with security providers and is designed to protect homeowners from unauthorized cancellation of their accounts. It is not a “complicated process” as tens of thousands of customers do it every year with more than 15,000 security providers.
  • We considered Mrs. O’Neill’s age (in her 60s) and possible confusion about contracts when making the decision to offer a generous resolution to her frustration, despite not being at fault.

 

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