RI Woman Who Took on BofA Goes After Verizon

RI Woman Who Took on BofA Goes After Verizon

She did it again.

The Cumberland woman who helped lead the fight against Bank of America’s decision to charge a $5 monthly fee for debit card usage managed to squash Verizon Wireless’ to charge a $2 fee for customers paying their bill online.

Molly Katchpole, who attended Roger Williams University and now works in Washington D.C., created an online petition at change.org that generated more than 140,000 signatures on Friday, prompting Verizon to cancel the $2 fee that was supposed to begin in January.

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“I just thought Verizon doesn’t get it,” Katchpole, 22, said. “So I got in touch with change.org and told them I wanted to create this petition.”

Out of Touch

Katchpole, whose last campaign against Bank of America went viral and generated over 300,000 signatures, was able to quickly grab about 30,000 signatures on Friday. By the time Verizon announced plans to cancel the $2 charges, the number of signatures had reached six figures.

“I just really feel that Verizon is out of touch,” Katchpole, a Verizon customer, said. “Especially with all that has been going on over the last few months.”

Katchpole’s message on the change.org petition was quick to the point. She blasted the idea to charge customers to pay their bill and criticized the billion dollar company for not paying income taxes.

“It’s not just about the money (though if you’re like me, you don’t have extra cash to be sending to a giant phone company in order to pay your own bills.) It’s that Verizon thinks it can do anything to its customers, and that we’re powerless to stop it. (Spoiler alert: We’re not.),” she wrote.

Katchpole continued: “And guess what? It turns out that Verizon paid zero federal income tax from 2008-2010. Actually, they got almost a billion dollars in rebates from taxpayers.”

Verizon Cancels Plan

A new message states Verizon’s intentions not to charge customers the $2 fee.

The company said it made the decision in response to customer feedback about the plan, which it claims was designed to improve the efficiency online and phone single payment transactions.

“At Verizon, we take great care to listen to our customers Based on their input, we believe the best path forward is to encourage customers to take advantage of the best and most efficient options, eliminating the need to institute the fee at this time,” said Dan Mead, president and chief executive officer of Verizon Wireless.

 

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