Verizon is reportedly issuing a $1,500 refund to a customer who recently discovered that she'd been paying every month for a long-canceled landline. Lauraine Hollyer of Glen Ridge, New Jersey, says she canceled her family's second landline around the year 2000, according to a story today at NJ.com. For a long time, she was not billed for that second line, but the charges apparently re-appeared about five years ago without her realizing it.

"When I was paying the April 2015 bill, I looked to see why my bills were so high," Hollyer told NJ.com. "I realized that my bill included a charge for message rate service and line maintenance of $25.94."

She started checking old bills and determined that she had been paying for the phantom landline since April 2010, "when Verizon changed the format of its bills," the article said. "The monthly charges varied slightly, but the five years of charges added up to $1,500.28." She paid the latest bill, but deducted the $25.94.

Hollyer says that she should have realized Verizon's mistake much earlier, but also said, "I have a right to expect that when a bill is submitted it is correct and that charges for something that has not been charged for over nine years won't all of a sudden magically show up."

Hollyer called Verizon on June 2, and a representative "put through an order to stop charging for the nonexistent line," but was only able to authorize a refund for three months' worth of charges. Hollyer said she was never able to connect with a manager who could authorize a bigger refund and that she received no response when she wrote to Verizon's chief financial officer. Instead, Verizon sent a letter threatening to suspend her service if she didn't pay "overdue" charges for April and May. She straightened that out with another call to Verizon, but still wasn't able to get anything better than a three-month refund until she contacted the media.

NJ.com contacted Verizon VP Tom Maguire, who researched the case and told the news site that Verizon would issue a $1,500 refund to Hollyer. Maguire "also said it's unacceptable that she didn't get the calls back that she was promised, and that Verizon would be talking to the people who didn't follow through," the report said.

We contacted Verizon this morning to ask whether it figured out why Hollyer was charged for a landline she had canceled years earlier and will provide more details if we get them.

UPDATE: Verizon got back to us, and says Hollyer may actually have been charged for the disconnected landline for more than five years. Verizon said it can't confirm whether the line was ever canceled, but did confirm that there hadn't been any activity on the line in years.

"It’s likely she had always been billed for the number," a Verizon spokesperson told Ars. "The bill format changed in 2010, but the customer didn’t notice the charges for the extra line until April 2015 and first contacted Verizon in June 2015."

Verizon said it reviewed network activity on the phone number going back to 2010. "There wasn't any, so the right thing to do for the customer was to provide her the $1,500 credit she requested since it was clear she had not used the service," the company said.

Verizon, which formed in the year 2000 after the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE, told Ars that it "doesn’t have any records going back that far to confirm whether the line was canceled."