A little over a month ago we got cell phones for all of our kids.  Our biggest worry was that our kids would make an obscene number of calls outside the network (calls to other VerizonWireless users are free) and rack up huge bills.  What never occurred to us was that our 11 year old son might get several collection calls from a credit card company.  Apparently someone who had his number before him owes a credit card company some bucks because they called him three times yesterday alone. 

Today I called the toll free number listed on the phone’s "missed call" directory and the phone was answered by GC Services which is a large call center and collection agency.  The lady I spoke with was helpful but could not find my son’s number in her system which suggested to her that he was in another of the call centers’ database.  (Celeste called the number earlier and had zero luck as well).  The solution?  If he gets another call he’s to hand the phone to me or Celeste and let us find out who they are trying to reach and then we can inform the collector that the number no longer belongs to the person he or she is trying to reach.  I’m really not sure why they can’t connect me to someone who has access to all the GC Services databases so that they can search for the number across all of their accounts at once in order to fix the problem, but that doesn’t seem to be an option.

So here’s my question: are we getting charged usage minutes for these calls and if so, what can we do about it?