Charleston woman’s Frontier bill spikes after not returning equipment

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WSAZ) - Joanna Warren has been a Frontier customer for more than a decade. In early 2022, she found out she would be getting a new router mailed to her.

“I was informed around January or February they were going to be upgrading the network in this area,” she recalled. “I’ll say around April, I received a notice I was going to have to change routers.”

The flyer included with her new router said her old one did not need to be returned and even provided instructions on how she could recycle it.

She said typically, she would have gotten rid of the old router right away, but a family tragedy kept her preoccupied.

“I lost my son in March, and so I didn’t have time to do like I normally do in my house, everything I’m not gonna use is going out to the trash,” she explained. “I didn’t have time to get around to discarding, I would’ve discarded but like I said I had a death in my family.”

She had not thought about the old router again until this week when she noticed her latest Frontier bill was $100 more than usual.

The charge was listed as “unreturned equipment” and the model and the serial number of the equipment matched Warren’s old router.

She called Frontier about the charge and was told it would be removed once the router was returned to them.

“I complained to them they were misleading when they said it didn’t need to be sent back,” she said. “Thank God, I kept it, thank god I didn’t get around to it, I don’t know why they would tell me they need it back when they told me they don’t need it back.”

In response to an email inquiry from WSAZ, Frontier said they would look into the issue right away saying it had to have been a mistake.

Joanna said she only paid her normal without the additional charge. She wants to warn other people so they do not get in a similar situation.

“I was thinking of other people, I didn’t know how to get the message out or who to get it to so I thought maybe if I put it out this way everyone would at least know,” she said. “If they hadn’t got out of their old router, to hold on to it that’s my purpose.”

As of 6:15 p.m. Wednesday, Frontier has not given any further details as to why Warren had been charged.

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