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.'"
An insult of a fine (Score:5, Informative)
It should also be noted that Verizon, as part of the settlement, is also refunding $52.8 million to their customers. But let's look at this more closely, shall we?
Verizon Wireless has 93.2 million subscribers. Let's assume (VERY conservatively) that only 5% of their customers were hit with bogus fees. Let's also assume that everyone who was overcharged was overcharged the bogus fee of $1.99 per month. The period in which the bogus fees were charged was about 3 years.
So we have: 4.66 million (or 5% of the customers) * (1.99 * 36) = 333,842,400 dollars. And that's the REALLY conservative estimate.
If every one of Verizon's consumers were overcharged $1.99 for 3 years, then that would come out to be 6,676,848,000 dollars.
So, for 3 years, they plundered their customers with bogus fees and now they're walking away paying back less than 1/3rd of the REALLY LOW END estimate of their misbegotten gains. No wonder companies act so egregiously bad! Why would they have to do things according to the law if they'll make more by breaking the law than they'll ever have to pay back in fees?
I like how they characterized it as just some clerical mistake. I wish I made clerical mistakes that can net me $300 million dollars.
Re:An insult of a fine (Score:4, Informative)
Verizon Wireless has 93.2 million subscribers. Let's assume (VERY conservatively) that only 5% of their customers were hit with bogus fees.
Well, not to defend Verizon, but 5% sounds about right to me. Between my family share plan (5 lines) and my corporate plan at work (46 lines) I've only seen this issue happen on two lines (2 / 51 = 3.9%).
It seems to be related to the inability of Verizon's billing system to properly determine the source of data. As an example, their backup assistant application is supposed to be completely free but I've seen it generate data charges before. Their billing system is supposed to discount very quick data sessions but I've seen phones hit with this fee when someone accidentally hit the "mobile web" button and exited out of it right away.
To Verizon's credit they never once argued with me when I called to request a refund of this fee. I did so every single time I saw it charged and received a refund every single time. In spite of those refunds I still got the credit from for this fee. Go figure.
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.
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The old rule of "never assign malice where ineptitude/stupidity/incompetence will suffice" seems to apply here. It could be malice. Could be intentional - but *really*. What engineer writes their software to intentionally miscalculate? These people pay mobile phone bills too.
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I consider it malicious to be so profit driven that you willfully neglect the care required to avoid such foulups in the first place.
Tech fuckups happen, but it's still evil (tm) to just turn a blind eye and whistle innocently until someone complains about it.
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Exactly. It could be considered a "mistake" until the first person complained about it, which was absolutely positively on the first day of the first billing cycle. Every single day after that, it was intentional fraud, and I can imagine no compelling counterargument.
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.
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Absolutely right.
An "accidental data charge" as they put it wouldn't necessarily need massive amounts of forensic accounting - you could just ask the customer service call centre what people were complaining about and see about putting the biggest individual sources of complaint right. Which they should be doing anyway from a customer service perspective and because it reduces the call volume (and hence the number of man-hours you have to pay for) at the call centre.
This is negligence bordering on the crim
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What engineer writes their software to intentionally miscalculate?
I take it you never watched Office Space? [imdb.com] ;)
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and seeing these lists of small fees added on to all my bills, feeling really helpless.
A business attaching fees to your invoices is all it takes to make you feel "really helpless"? You know you could walk away from Verizon Wireless anytime you want, right? Wireless service is hardly a matter of life and death....
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and seeing these lists of small fees added on to all my bills, feeling really helpless.
A business attaching fees to your invoices is all it takes to make you feel "really helpless"? You know you could walk away from Verizon Wireless anytime you want, right? Wireless service is hardly a matter of life and death....
Yup, and pay a $400 early termination fee. Man, that'll really teach Verizon a lesson!
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Do you not have any form of Unfair contract terms acts in the US, or anything at all consumer protection wise? What about fraud statutes?
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I have an modern update for that old canard. "Never assign malice where *greed* will suffice".
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>>>ever assign malice where ineptitude/stupidity/incompetence will suffice
True but sometimes the incompetence is "embraced" by the management because it turns-out to be so profitable for them. Like this guy in this video. Verizon was and still is aware of the problem, but has done nothing to fix it, because it works to their advantage! Anyway: This guy owes .002 cents/KB times 35896 KB used == 71.8 cents. But Verizon is trying to charge 71.8 dollars. No wonder I hate corporations.
http://www.yo [youtube.com]
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If user=someone_important
then amount=correct
else amount=possibly_incorrect
Boss: "You'd better find a way to make us more money, or you won't get a bonus!"
Programmer: "Got it...you see, what I did was..."
Boss: "That's nice. My printer isn't working, could you look at it for me?"
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Any engineer whose boss tells them to do so. Not really "miscalculate", just like "simplify it"
If you can't reliably decide when the discount applies and when not to apply it, apply it only to the smallest possible 100% sure subset. If your app can't work correctly due to overwhelming complexity of correct solution, choose mistakes/simplifications in a way that brings most revenue.
Somehow I almost never see news "Company X lost $$$mln in erroneously assigned discounts to customers", "Company X made a $$$mln
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.
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It probably tries to dial out on occasion to upload information.
If you're phone line is in use a lot, or off the hook (or some other reason that the box doesn't get a dial-tone), then the box can't "phone home" as frequently as the central office is expecting.
I bet, if the box doesn't phone home frequently enough, the system automatically generates an alert, which triggers the charge, even if the box is connected.
This is all speculation, but seems about right.
Re:An insult of a fine (Score:5, Informative)
I, on the other hand, have witnessed problems with every line of Verizon service where I work. That is everything from Verizon Wireless to T1 to OC3 and MPLS services. Verizon billed another company for our service for almost 3 months. And for the services we have there are always unanswered and "unanswerable" items on our bills. We are presently in a dispute state meaning they can't turn our service off for non-payment which is part of their standard agreement. I would urge you do the same on your business accounts with issues. What's weirder still, in spite of the fact that no representative can explain the strange charges, they insist that we owe them. Imagine that? We owe something that no one understands? Not even Verizon? Really.
I will never willingly be a Verizon customer.
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Not that it is justified, but AT&T is about the same with their business accounts. It took us most of a year to get them to realize they owed us over $6,000, and 6 months after that to get them to apply the credits to our bill. Needless to say, once the credits were used up, we changed our 12 phone lines and 3mbit worth of data lines over, to Time Warner, and get better service, similar or better uptime, for about $30,000 less per year.
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I've also got family share, with 5 lines; I just logged in to Verizon, and all my lines except 1, the one I have "unlimited data" on, have data charges. and those 4 other lines have data blocked.
1 of those lines is my mom's emergency phone, which has never had a text sent or received on it, at least not in the last 13 months; she doesn't do that sort of thing.
She also is being billed for 3 "premium" SMS messages this month...
Not counting the premium SMS thing, every month I get data charges on those blocked
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Well their total wireless revenue was about $61B in 2009...that is just wireless revenue...$108B overall.
You do that math...
Re:An insult of a fine (Score:5, Insightful)
like how they characterized it as just some clerical mistake. I wish I made clerical mistakes that can net me $300 million dollars.
It'd be interesting to see how much of a dent this makes in their total income - it may be feasible that this was, in fact, simply a clerical error depsite the fact it'd be huge for the vast majorit of us. This doesn't justify it, of course, but I wouldn't rush to assume it was obviously malicious and intentful.
You know, I'd love to agree with you, but tell me this: What are the odds that they would be willing to allow a clerical error that lost them a similar amount of money?
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> So, for 3 years, they plundered their customers with bogus fees and now they're walking away paying back less than 1/3rd of the REALLY LOW END estimate of their misbegotten gains.
Yes, it's almost as if they were trying to announce a settlement fee/fine due to an upcoming election.
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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."
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I certainly hope it will be a warning sign to other companies. However, since they can get away with a rather small fine, and pass on the cost to the customer anyways, I'm not quite convinced it's an effective deterrent.
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>>>they start threatening to raise rates and institute layoffs.
My reply would be something like this: "Okay. That won't change the amount of the fine because you committed a crime, and I intend to see you pay at least double the damages you caused. In fact I don't care if your entire company goes bankrupt. It will be quickly replaced by newer, better companies. Look what happened to Circuit City - we're better off without CC and I bet we'd be better off without Verizon too."
Them: "....."
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All you need to do is say: "If stuff like this happens again, the people responsible are jailed for years". "Sorry, limited liability is only for 'civil' stuff, persistently taking money that isn't yours and been told you should stop taking comes under 'criminal'".
If you're a billionaire and your company gets bankrupted or closed down by the Gov/regulators it's not as bad as you sitting in prison for a numb
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Inadvertent?
There were stories out there where there were external buttons on certain phones that when pressed sent the phone directly to the web. So when you shoved your phone in your pocket the wrong way (as Steve Jobs would put it), sometimes you started accruing data charges. Inadvertent? Yes. Decision to make an extenal button (that is easily pressed by mistake) start the per-kilobyte billing? Your call on that. I know what I think.
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"Let's also assume that everyone who was overcharged was overcharged the bogus fee of $1.99 per month. The period in which the bogus fees were charged was about 3 years."
Wrong assumption. I am one of the people who got charged the fee, but it only happened once or twice in a three year period. You only get the fee the months you accidentally pressed the button. The issue is that pressing the button loads a webpage, which uses up ~0.5 kb. Then, Verizon rounded that up to 1 MB, and charged a couple of bucks.
Re:An insult of a fine (Score:5, Insightful)
The really amusing bit is that corporations are legally considered people, unless it's disadvantageous to the corporation in a given situation. Want to donate to a politician? You're a PERSON! Want to run ads blasting another politician? You're a PERSON!
Want to avoid the felony grand theft penalties PEOPLE face when they steal millions of dollars? Oh, well, OK, I guess you're not a person until the judge makes his decision on the penalty you face.
To my way of thinking, if corporations want to be considered people, then that's fine. But if the corporation commits a crime, it goes to jail, by which I mean no business transactions except for payment of debt, at ALL, for the length of the jail sentence. Verizon steals millions of dollars? Guess what folks? You're shut down for the 1-20 year jail sentence. Yes, that will ruin you, but you're the one who wanted to be a person.
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.
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oh and another thing any of the board members should have a federal maximum wage of say $80.00 an hour (no salaried jobs) for the entire term of the CEOs jail term.
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$80 an hour is too high. Make it the average of the median household income and the poverty line (which would be about $16.30 a hour) in a non-management job while sequestering any investments and then maybe (just maybe) board members would be a little vigilant.
Probably not. I can't think of a job that pays $16.30 an hour that a corporate board member would be qualified to do. Rubber stamping the desires of the CEO isn't a useful skill.
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This is false. It's just something that politicians say to get under-thinking voters riled up. And then the under-thinkers latch on to this and repeat it as if it was fact. You obviously have never owned or run a company.
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He omits important caveat. LARGE companies pay almost no to no taxes. Small companies pay a lot.
Because large companies have the lobbying power to make sure they don't have to pay taxes. As a certain infamous billionaire said, "taxes are for the poor".
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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 assure
Re:An insult of a fine (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
And all the customers will get ponies!
Re:An insult of a fine (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately, proofs of said activity will be released only by order of the very people who committed the crime. The corporation can make it as easy or as difficult (impossible) for the investigator to gather proofs on selected employees. Papers get displaced, entries get deleted, witnesses know nothing, people who might know a thing are transferred to a unit in Paraguay, and the conclusion of the investigation is "general incompetence caused the mistake, and I wonder how such a mess of a company can act at all".
Nope, you must be really, really willing to lose your job, chance to be employed by others in the industry and risk lawsuits on bogus charges from your employer, if you, as an employee want to let investigators know -who- personally is responsible.
Unless, of course, that person was out of favor, and is the designated scapegoat.
Re:An insult of a fine (Score:4, Informative)
Good lord, do you really think that the only way for the public to be fleeced is for a C level executive to give written orders to do it?
Here's a scenario: John the CTO goes down to the billing engineers and tells them, verbally, "we want to see a 5% increase in profits from spurious charges. Make it happen."
This isn't written down anywhere. The meeting happened, but it was just a generic meeting with the team - nothing special, nothing permanent. Other business was covered too. How do you prove he said that?
Here's an even more common scenario: Joe the CEO tell John the CTO, "We're making money hand over fist. I want to make even more. Make it happen." So John the CTO runs his billing engineers ragged, and randomly weird charges and weird discounts start cropping up in people's phone bills. He throws fits about the weird discounts, they get fixed, but the weird charges - well, nobody really cares about them in the billing department, that's accounting's job.
I mean, how do you think horribly defective products like the Ford Pinto make it to the market? Most of the time, it's not because the people engineering them suck - it's because management, up above them, is driving the engineers too hard.
This is why I, personally, think we should really start increasing the amount of personal liability that managers high up in corporations are exposed to. Right now there is basically no penalty to saying "ship it now nerdboys, who cares if it might explode?" besides perhaps tarnishing the company's reputation (and who cares about that? Reputation is a currency traded on the order of decades, and you won't be around any more by that point). If there were actual, personal penalties for your company shipping a defective product (or fraudulently billing people, or accidentally sourcing from a Chinese factory that uses lead paint), then managers would make damn sure that what they're doing is right.
I mean, that's the normal argument for why CEOs make so much money, right? That they have far more riding on their shoulders? Why don't we make that argument true in fact, instead of just true in theory?
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I mean, that's the normal argument for why CEOs make so much money, right? That they have far more riding on their shoulders? Why don't we make that argument true in fact, instead of just true in theory?
That reason is given as obfuscation to avoid unpleasant revolution-like movement when the masses figure out that the only reason most CEOs get the job is because they have the proper social contacts with those who are hiring.
Practical management skills are of really, REALLY low importance on the hiring requirement for top management. Pedigree, studying in the right university, having the right people you know and going to the right golf club on the other hand is very high. Essentially they are the new arist
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But in this, you are still neglecting that corporations are not sentient beings and they cannot make decisions or operate on their own.
Which is why corporate personhood is bullshit to begin with.
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This is the same utter BS that the Republicans have been trying to convince us of for over 3 decades.
I'm not going to bother dissecting your post point by point, but I will make a couple observations:
First, Verizon isn't making the public whole. That's the whole point of Sonny's post. They're paying back less than a third of the *conservative* estimate of what they stole. That sounds like a great arrangement to me. Hell, I'd be happy to rob 30 grand from a bank, and then give them 10 grand back and have the
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I figured the Enron fiasco was the eye opener here. They paid back a tiny fraction of what they pillaged. Now it's standard operating procedure, I'm not surprised that Verizon did this. I remember when the phone company was billing a federal tax that didn't exist... for years and years. Regardless this is a pretty slimy thing to do to your customers.
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And that's the REALLY conservative estimate.
Add that to "Verizon Wireless said in a news release that its overcharges were inadvertent." Inadvertant? Really? If anyone believes that, I have a bridge for sale. Never assume incompetence when greedy self-interest will explain.
If your "mistake" makes you money, I'm not going to believe it's a mistake without proof. And even after the fine, it looks like they made money on the deal.
Re:An insult of a fine (Score:5, Insightful)
So, for Verizon, this was a profitable venture. And profitable for whoever the fine is paid to as well, right?
Doesn't this all feel more like an incentive to continue this behavior if the full amount of the money wasn't refunded in addition to the fine?
Even if this instance weren't profitable, it'd still be incentive to continue doing other things like this. If you get caught, just pay it back, no harm no foul. And if you don't get caught, well, then you made out in the end.
Isn't this is exactly the kind of behavior that the possibility of punitive damages in a court settlement is supposed to prevent? If so, I realize punitive damages should probably only be awarded in the case of negligence, but it seems like if this has been going on for three years, it's hard to claim it's an accident and not be considered negligent in fixing it. But for some reason, the FCC decided they wouldn't pursue those damages.
IANAL, and I don't have much experience with the law, but I'm curious whether or not this still leaves Verizon open for a class action lawsuit. If this is has been going on for three years, with charges customers would have had to dispute each month, it seems like Verizon should reimburse their customers for the time they spent disputing the charges, and pay hefty punitive damages to discourage Verizon and others from doing the same thing in the future.
Assuming an average income of $32,000, and a probably conservative estimate of 15 minutes to detect, report, and rectify the the charges, each month, over 36 months, that's
$16/hour * .25hours/month * 36 months + $2/month * 36 months = $216 per person affected.
If 5% of the people were affected, that comes out to just over $1 billion in compensatory damages. On a conservative estimate.
Re:An insult of a fine (Score:4, Informative)
Isn't this is exactly the kind of behavior that the possibility of punitive damages in a court settlement is supposed to prevent?
You're forgetting the *settlement* part. Not a judgement. A judgement can carry punitive damages. A settlement is whatever the parties agree to outside of court.
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Thing is by controlling the media the corporations have the politicians by the balls, since they determine who gets air time during election season.
Pissing off (or failing to kiss up to) a corporation that is exposing you to your voters is political suicide.
And self incorporation doesn't work.
The same corporations that control the media also don't much care for small fry on their turf, and they regularly can and do litigate their competition into oblivion. It is a legal jungle out there, where survival of
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No article? (Score:2, Interesting)
Verizon also promises... (Score:5, Funny)
I'd RTFA (Score:3, Funny)
But, apparently, there is no FA to R. Way to go. tim-mahy!
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Maybe that's all the relevant info from the article and they spared us the rest.
Well, duh. (Score:5, Informative)
> Verizon Wireless said in a news release that its overcharges were inadvertent.
Also, Bank of America is kindhearted and bankrolls Santa's elves.
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This isn't a small company here. This is VERIZON. They have ass-loads of people working all day long figuring out billing trends and analyzing where their profits come from. To feign ignorance is impossible... and irrelevant. "Oops we committed fraud" should not work, but apparently does when you are a corporation. I'll have to try that some day when I appear before a judge and try to use BS like this as precedent.
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!)
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Same thing happened to me. I eventually asked them to just disable the data service for my plan because I'd decided to never use it the way they kept screwing me over. I still kept getting the charge even though I'd called and had the service 'disabled' on the account... several times.
Screw Verizon. I'm with Sprint now and never intend to use Verizon again.
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But they don't get a chance to overcharge me for the privilege for it.
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>>>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.
Well if your brother really feels they owe him something, say $50, then he could just steal a Verizon phone worth that value. Like how Robin Hood used to do (steal from the rich to return the money they had stolen from the poor).
Right. "accidental". (Score:5, Insightful)
Verizon: We'll pay $0.25M (Score:5, Funny)
Let me guess (Score:2)
25 million people each get a dollar?
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No. A coupon for free text messages.
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Oblig. (Score:2, Informative)
Quote: George Vaccaro wanted to point out to Verizon that they were saying ".002 cents" and meaning to say ".002 dollars" but he found that every single person at Verizon did not understand the difference
Audio and (I believe) transcript available. It is painful.
Back-handed Apology (Score:3, Interesting)
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Error? really? (Score:2)
>>> Verizon Wireless said ... 'We accept responsibility for those errors...'
Its funny how you never see any billing 'errors' where the company is the one loosing out.
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Sure you do. My friend in Memphis, TN got a friendly letter from the Memphis Light Gas & Water utility. They kindly told him that they had inadvertently under-read his meter for three months, and that they apologize profusely.
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Mobile ripoff industry! (Score:2, Interesting)
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Our family went back to a single land-line about six months ago.
Since then, I can think of exactly three instances where I wished I had a cellphone...and got by just fine without one anyways.
Compared to our previous Verizon service (which sucked ass, to say the least), we save about $600 a year.
It is also a liberating experience to be able to just tell people "Just leave a message..." when I give them my phone number. NOT having a cellphone relieves one of a certain amount of obligation that most people are
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Then Roger should get better hookers.
Statistical significance test (Score:4, Insightful)
You know these things happen 'accidentally' because 50% of the time the error is in the customer's favour.....
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You know these things happen 'accidentally' because 50% of the time the error is in the customer's favour.....
Haha, good point - I've personally lost count of the number of times my TelCo has given me bonus money for no good reason :}
Human nature test (Score:2, Insightful)
AT&T is doing it now (Score:3, Informative)
Obligatory movie reference (Score:2)
PETER: That's the beauty of it. Each withdrawal is a fraction of a cent. That's too small to notice. Take a thousand withdrawals a day, space it out over a few years, that's a couple hundred thousand dollars.
MICHAEL: Just like Superman III.
AT&T should be next in line for mystery fees (Score:2)
I remember AT&T slapping on $10 of "government fees and taxes" to my $60 plan, without specifying what those fees and taxes were.
I really hope they get to pay for that one day...
"we accept responsibility" (Score:2)
By 'accept responsibility' do they refer to the $24mil fine as merely the cost of doing business, or do they in fact plan to accept responsibility as in making the injured parties whole, by issuing refunds of past customers, and extending credits to current customers, cutting down their bills to pay back the illegal gains?
Testimonial from someone who dealt with it (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's do some math to put things in perspective (Score:2)
Verizon Wireless reported $49.332 billion in revenue in 2008.
The median annual household income in the US in 2006 was $50,233.
The $25M settlement for Verizon is equivalent to Joe Average paying a $25 fine.
(Note that I don't count the rest, as it was just the return of stolen money)
Question #1: Is this what the average person expected to be hit with after defrauding millions of people for over 2 years?
Question #2: Will that fee affect the income of Verizon executives in any way?
Question #3: Where will the mo
In other News (Score:2)
*<supersmall><evensmaller><color ="almost-white">This is not a real tax, just a fee we need to pay for our fines</color></evensmaller></supersmall>
Missed an implication, there. (Score:2)
We accept responsibility for those errors now that we have been caught and forced in court to do so
FTFY.
accidental data charges (Score:2)
"We accept responsibility for those errors, and apologize to our customers who received accidental data charges on their bills. We also send a big FUCK YOU to those we purposely tried to screw for money in full awareness of making bogus charges, and make a solemn promise to get these bastards who sued us for that."
Yes, of course... (Score:2)
Verizon Wireless said in a news release that its overcharges were inadvertent.
Of course they were, I too don't notice when my bank account has millions of dollars more that it's supposed to have... 3 years in a f*cking row!
If they truly did not know about the overcharges, the CFO and Controller both need to be fired for incompetence.
Shortfall (Score:2)
Re: (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.
Re: (Score:2)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I had some billing disputes with VZW in the past, and that's exactly how they did it.
As far as I can remember, the only time I've ever had a wireless company actually cut me a check was when I got back the deposit from my very first cell phone contract (I was too young to pass a credit check at the time).