Verizon To Pay $25M For Years of 'Mystery Fees' 215
Ponca City writes "The Washington Post reports that the FCC has reached a record $25 million settlement with Verizon Wireless over the company's wrongly charging subscribers 'mystery' Internet fees over the past several years — the largest settlement in FCC history. With the action, Verizon Wireless's total costs associated with false data fees reached $77.8 million, one of the largest payouts for false business practices in the communications services industry. 'People shouldn't find mystery fees when they open their phone bills — and they certainly shouldn't have to pay for services they didn't want and didn't use,' says FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. 'In these rough economic times, every $1.99 counts.' Verizon Wireless said in a news release that its overcharges were inadvertent. 'We accept responsibility for those errors, and apologize to our customers who received accidental data charges on their bills.'"
No article? (Score:2, Interesting)
Inadvertent my ars (Score:5, Interesting)
My brother-in-law was on Verizon for years. Each of his phones had a button which connected to the Verizon store where you would go to buy games or ring tones or whatever. My T-Mobile phones always had t-zones buttons; same thing, no big deal. Except for on Verizon, if you didn't subscribe to a data plan, every time you pushed that button, whether intentional or not, your phone initiated a data connection to Verizon and you were hit with the $1.99 fee. I know this because every month he would call Verizon and dispute the charge and they would give him the run around for a while before apologizing and crediting his account for the charges. Because he was under contract, this continued for 2 years. I think Verizon should pay him for the many hours of his life he spent arguing on the phone with their customer service reps trying to get these charges reversed.
On an related note, he is now on T-Mobile (free mobile to mobile calling, woot!)
Re:An insult of a fine (Score:4, Interesting)
Except that TFA, which is Verizon Wireless to pay $25M for spurious fees [washingtonpost.com], says that Verizon agreed to provide refunds to 15 million, not the 4.66 million the parent erroneously estimates. I find it very curious that Verizon is not disclosing the actual total amount of the refunds. Smells like a coverup.
PROFIT! (Score:1, Interesting)
so let me get this straight
$2 per bill * 1 million bills per month = $2,000,000 per month * "years" = $72+ million
72 million - 25 million = PROFIT!
I wish I had a license to steal from people.
Re:An insult of a fine (Score:2, Interesting)
Verizon Wireless said in a news release that its overcharges were inadvertent. 'We accept responsibility for those errors, and apologize to our customers who received accidental data charges on their bills.'
TRANSLATION: "We accept that we got caught billing people for stuff they didn't order, and we promise to be craftier next time in hiding these 'accidental data charges' on their bills."
Re:So tell me again how Verizon is better? (Score:3, Interesting)
So you play musical chair annually. How does that solve the problem? Without real competition all you're doing is paying these carriers to screw you. Don't matter which one, because they all act the same.
Re:An insult of a fine (Score:1, Interesting)
What's really funny to me is that, while the premise of the movie "Office Space" was loosely based on this principle (stealing very small fractions of a transaction over large numbers of transactions), it is in reality CORPORATIONS who have actually embraced this.
While we were all laughing at what a fun, but silly prospect such a thing would be (given the ridiculous jail time that would surely accompany such a proposition for an individual) the corporate fat-cats' eyes were lighting up at the possibilities.
By allowing this sort of bullshit to continue, the government is effectually saying, "If you want to break the law and get away with it, start a corporation. The bigger it is, the more you'll be able to get away with."
Maybe we should all start incorporating ourselves? All of the benefits of being a citizen with none of the responsibilities for law-breaking.
Or.
Perhaps we could just pass laws requiring businesses to pay back TENFOLD to their customers what they've stolen when this sort of shit happens.
Back-handed Apology (Score:3, Interesting)
Mobile ripoff industry! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:An insult of a fine (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the reality of corporate personhood in a nutshell.
All of the advantages (rights, freedoms, profits)
with none of the disadvantages (jail, death, taxes)
(And don't say they pay taxes. The majority of corporations in the U.S. pay no taxes AT ALL).
If corporations are bad actors in a country, they ought to be have their charter revoked with no enumeration to stockholders. If CEOs are so responsible for a company (as they insist every time the subject of CEO pay packages come up) then they go to jail when the company breaks the law.
Re:An insult of a fine (Score:5, Interesting)
Back when I was 17~19, I was on my dad's family plan. We got a mystery $14.99/month VPAK that appeared on multiple phones multiple times. None of us used the multimedia features of the phone, and I even went online and parental-control-banned all multimedia features from my own phone, but the charge still kept coming back. Of course, every time we complained they revoked the charge, but we had to scan our bill every month to make sure we didn't have the bogus charges.
Finally, after the charge came back at least 6 or 7 times, my dad got fed up and told Verizon that if the charge appears there one more time, he's canceling the whole family plan, and the company that he is an executive at will switch to Sprint (the company has a couple thousand verizon phones). The charge never re-appeared.
I am completely convinced that these charges are intentional, and I bet they target people who have kids and family plans, as they're more likely to blame their kids for downloading something than complain that Verizon was giving them bogus charges.
Re:An insult of a fine (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no such thing as negligence on this scale. To see excess money coming in without explanation is not something that would go unnoticed for any amount of time. What's more, there were countless complaints from customers about it. Complaints that were ignored or refused in most cases. It took the FCC to get them to reverse on this. Not only should they have known on their own, but they were informed from thousands and thousands of victims and still did nothing about it.
If you really think this was just carelessness you are a complete fool.
Re:An insult of a fine (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:An insult of a fine (Score:3, Interesting)
Dude, pass that bong your sucking on over here.
They are still a person in the same sense. The problem is how to you prove that they acted in a certain way instead of careless employees making mistakes or acting on their own (with and or without knowledge of the consequences)? It's very difficult. But rest assures, if there is proof that a CEO, Board Member, or any Manager gave orders to fleece the public, those people can and will be held criminally accountable. Being a company doesn't shield anyone from any criminal prosecution, it shields them from criminal prosecution through an act that was no fault of their own. And even to that point, carelessness can still be grounds for criminal prosecution, just ask the CEO of Tyco and World Com.
This country is founded on the basics of being fair in out judicial system and criminal prosecution. This means actually prosecuting people who committed the crime, not some stand in who you cannot prove had any role. We do not allow corruption of blood, metaphorically or literally. Thankfully, even when they cannot prove any single person at fault, but the crime or wrong was committed, there is a legal concept called"Respondeat superior" [wikipedia.org] that allows vicarious liability [wikipedia.org] to wrongs committed by people that are attributed to a corporation.
Obviously, you haven't thought this through much. If a company is forced to not operate, it still owes it's shareholders/owners it's value. They can simply take that and start another company with new management doing the same line of business. That's why a fine is much more valuable to prosecuting a corporation. If you wanted to impose the same general liability of "no business for 1-20 years", then fine them an amount equaling the revenue minus expenses for that time period and enforce monitoring that generates a proper attitude towards serving the public. Then if they liquidate, which even convicted felons are allowed to do if the fruit is not borne of the crime they are convicted of, the fine has top priority in payout. In other words, they cannot simply open back up under a different name because the value goes to pay the fine before being returned to shareholders or debtors. The government gets theirs first.
But in this, you are still neglecting that corporations are not sentient beings and they cannot make decisions or operate on their own. There are people running the corporation (which is the basic component structure of why corporations are necessary) and it's those who did the deed that is criminal. Justice can be served just as well by prosecuting the people directly responsible for the crime and adding vicarious liability to the corporation for failing to stop it. In this case, once the problem was legally brought to Verizon's attention, they claimed it was a mistake (prove them different with facts and not innuendos and quick conclusions) and they were willing to make full restitution. And yes, that's the entire point behind actions like this, to make the public whole again. If Verizon refused to do so, they would have been prosecuted, most likely fined, and had to give refunds anyways.