Spectrum Threatens Former Customers In Renewal Shakedown (latimes.com) 197
An anonymous reader writes: Spectrum has been sending former customers strange letters threatening to report them to the credit agencies unless they renew services, in attempt to win back their business. The letters say that "as a one-time courtesy," the company will cancel debt it claims they owe and stop reporting them to credit agencies -- if they agree to resume cable service. The threat continues by stating that "You have worked hard to build a great future for yourself and your family" "We look forward to welcoming you back."
What genius thought this up? (Score:5, Insightful)
This sound like criminal extortion to me. I'd love to see the DA get involved with this.
Re:What genius thought this up? (Score:4, Funny)
Indeed. How thoughtful of them to have provided written evidence.
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Could this be a misdirected letter? Otherwise mail a copy to the relevant agencies and let them deal with it. That's why you all pay taxes in the first place.
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Sure, except that we're dealing with an established company of reasonable size here. If an individual or very small company does it, things like fraud, extortion, etc. means that someone is going to prison. For a largish company, it probably just means a fine.
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RICO doesn't mean a business did a thing that was illegal. It would require that they not actually have a real cable business, that it be a front, with their real business being the illegal thing.
https://www.popehat.com/2016/0... [popehat.com]
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Re:What genius thought this up? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now that Spectrum has admitted the debt doesn't exist, if they continue to send letters they won't have much of a leg to stand on when the AG comes knocking.
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had subscriptions that should have expired result in negative credit reports because I did not update by credit card. People want their money. Negative credit reports are a risk free way to get it ...
This depends on the terms of the subscription agreement. If you had agreed to renewal and they continued to deliver a service after the card expired, then the buyer has a legitimate debt for that time period that service was provided but no payment was made for.
On the other hand.. if they cancelled/stopped
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Let's be honest. How much of Symantec's residential sales are annual renewals for Norton Antivirus on computers that were recycled years ago?
Continuing to deliver a service should not mean an abandoned online account with a service that could be used if you knew about it but is actually not being utilized.
As shady as some businesses are getting about renewals, I think that consumers need more than just the 60-day chargeback window - they need to be able to go directly to the company and demand years of ref
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This is why I still pay my bills by check, seeing that bill on the counter means that I'll actually look at the charges. If I just do it online I know I'm far to lazy to actually review it every month.
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I think that consumers need more than just the 60-day chargeback window -
The typical window provided by payment processors is 120 days. This does not mean you could not demand a refund after a longer period of time, however: It's only that the payment processor does not help you after that time, and you might be limited to pursue recourse directly against the service provider.
Continuing to deliver a service should not mean an abandoned online account ...
Oh, for sure agreed. It SHOULD be that way. I
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The last time I dealt with a cable company (Videotron), they told me they sent me a notice of renewal and since I didn't cancel, I was on the hook for the entire next year of service. They sent me to collections even though I told them I had gotten no such notice. In the end I had to pay out my contract at full price just to be rid of them since they had shut down my service but still sent me to an agency to get the other 10 months of payments. Paying out was less expensive than damaging my credit rating.
Wired magazine did this to me (Score:2)
Back in the late 1990s I had a subscription to Wired magazine and let it expire. They sent me to collections for not renewing. How the fuck does that work? I paid for a year of magazines and you delivered. Our contract has ended I owe you nothing. Told the collections company about not renewing and never heard about it again. Fuck those assholes and their $15.
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Small Claims court is still an option. People need to start learning how to use it.
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Re: What genius thought this up? (Score:3)
You win the psychopath award. Nails are indiscriminate and can just as easily hurt somebody completely innocent. (Happened to me. I live next to a Comcast driver)
Plus, sabotaging a truck endangers the driver, who had nothing to do with it.
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Stick your dick in there and give it a try, at least; you never know, it might work!
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One would need a bladder of prodigious capacity for that to work. If the gasoline has Ethanol, that'll probably allow a bladder's worth of urine to just dissolve into the fuel and be burnt fairly harmlessly.
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That's terrible. Nobody should have to send their kids to a school which also doubles as a SAM site. Aren't there rules of war, that Comcast employees shouldn't be allowed to park their trucks in civilized neighborhoods?
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who had nothing to do with it
But you said he worked for Comcast?
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That's kind of like blaming a farmer for war crimes... the guy runs Coaxial cable, hardly a controversial occupation.
Unless you're an ignorant prick who doesn't realize that it's cheaper and easier to just re-run the cable than to troubleshoot intermittent and/or poorly performing "old" wiring.
I've run more than enough datacomm wiring (Whether Ethernet, POTS, or Coax) to know. The Comcast guy just doesn't want to have to come back later as then his performance review goes down the toilet.
That can't be legal... (Score:2)
can it? It seems this is gonna blow up in their faces big time...
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Collection letters from debt agencies sound tougher than that including the whole "law firm of...".
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What would be illegal is if they called or wrote to a customer threatening to report a false debt they either know to be false or have not taken appropriate care to verify, and it's unlikely they would -- FCB violations and all.. the customers would be able to sue for some serious $$ if they actually did that.
There's nothing wrong with what they have done by making a generic promotion to offer former customers an opportunity where the company will forgive any outstanding debts and remove derogatory items
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There are credit protection laws. People would do themselves a big service by becoming familiar with them.
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You mean other than the Mafia-esque Nice credit rating you have there. It's be a real shame if anything happened to it.
Particularly when sent to someone who doesn't owe them any debt.
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There's nothing wrong with what they have done by making a generic promotion...
Yes, did you?
Spectrum always pushes (Score:5, Interesting)
If you cancel a business with them, they send you bills after the cancellation. If you call and yell at them, they tell you it was an "honest" mistake and reverse the charge.
They will turn your information over to a collection agency ~30 days after cancellation. Way too early. Then you get threatening letters from the collection agency.
They demand the return of your equipment, even though they have no use for it. They do not give it to a new customer, they burn it (store employee at Spectrum used the word "burn").
After you cancel your account with them, they tell you to return your equipment. Then when you try to return your equipment at a spectrum store, they tell you they can't accept the equipment because the account has been canceled. They give you an address to mail it back.
These people are evil.
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That's why you do everything in a CYA manner. That pretty much applies to any large organization from businesses to government (oh boy can they make your life a living hell).
Re:Spectrum always pushes (Score:5, Interesting)
These people are evil.
My local Comcast customer service center had a little old lady walk in with a baseball bat and smash up the store. It takes a special level of evil to drive Grandma to commit violence.
Re:Spectrum always pushes (Score:4, Funny)
Clearly, you have limited experience with grandmas.
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I always hope I'll be lucky enough to be in a store when that sort of thing happens. So far, I haven't. As long as I'm not the target in any way, I'd love to see someone just come in and trash the place. Or maybe they're there to return their equipment, which they set on the ground and then go all Office Space on in the middle of the store.
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I also wish I could have seen it.
And I didn't make this up! Here's the story [washingtonpost.com]. (Claw hammer, not a baseball bat.)
"Her take on Comcast: What a bunch of sub-moronic imbeciles."
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Nice article
Bacha noted that Comcast has more than 25 million customers, the overwhelming majority of which are very satistified with their service.
From the article, who believes that quote ? No one I know is happy with COMCAST (Xfinity). They even changed their name due to their low ranking.
So Bacha let me fixed that for you, 0.00001% of your customers thinks your service ranks sightly above "OK". And I think everyone here agrees with me
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"Until there! On the horizon! It's Hammer Woman, avenger of oppressed cable subscribers everywhere! (Cue galloping "Lone Ranger" theme.)"
Re:Spectrum (Score:2)
Re:Spectrum always pushes (Score:5, Interesting)
Cancel in person in their office. Get a receipt for the equipment.
I had an ISP try that game with me years ago. The (out of state) collection agency I told I had no intention of paying them, then ignored. They went away after I pointed out to them that they couldn't even sue me for the outdated DSL $800 they claimed the modem was worth (plus about as much in "fees and penalties" without me being able to countersue them for $30,000 in Fair Debt Collections Practices Act violations (which I detailed for them), and that if they kept bothering me, it would soon be worth hiring an attorney in their state to sue them. When the local law firm specializing in collections sent me a letter, I explained what had happened (and they the ISP had confirmed that they had a record of me returning the modem), and that if I had to dig the receipt out of the box it was in in the garage (it had been well over a year at that point), I'd expect a $1,500 document retrieval fee that they would agree to by asking to see the receipt. (Which I couldn't have made stick, but it let them know I was tired of the BS.
Never heard from them or the ISP again. Never saw a ding on the credit report, either.
Re: Spectrum always pushes (Score:2)
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Wells Fargoism is Common (Score:2)
I've heard this multiple times from multiple telecom companies for multiple reasons, such as "phone insurance" I didn't ask for. Isn't that what Wells Fargo did? Keeping making tons of "mistakes"?
One co that rhymes Ate Tea and Pee was the worse offender, requiring many phone calls to fix the bill. They don't even allow email discussions, forcing you to wait in phone queues as a disincentive.
I realize regulation makes services more expensive, bu
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The problem with "stronger referees" is called "regulatory capture". Those who regulate a company should be forever after forbidden from working for the companies that they regulated or receiving any other emolument from them.
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If they want their equipment, they should by all means come and get it. If they abandon it on my property, I will be happy to smash it with a hammer and send them a picture.
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That is also their call if they deem their "store" and the people there to be Not the appropriate persons or places to return their property to.
So how far can that go? What if they require that it be hand delivered to the top of Mount Everest? Surely that would not be reasonable. So is it reasonable that they tell you to return it to the store, then at the store they tell you to mail it somewhere else? If that is okay, can they tell you to return it to the store, then tell you to go to another location, then that location tells you to mail it?
Years ago, I returned a product to a store that had a "no refunds" sign. I printed a copy of state law
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So how far can that go? What if they require that it be hand delivered to the top of Mount Everest?
Surely that clause would have been "clearly" spelled out in their contract. You did read the contract, right?
So is it reasonable that they tell you to return it to the store, then at the store they tell you to mail it somewhere else? If that is okay, can they tell you to return it to the store, then tell you to go to another location, then that location tells you to mail it?
Reasonable and Legal are not mutually inclusive concepts.
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... where acct_status = 'delinquent' ... (Score:2)
Sounds like somebody forgot a where clause on the query.
This might be useful for someone with a suspended account. But it's a big F-U to everybody else.
Oops.
Fraud (Score:2)
Counting down the days (Score:2)
There's a small independent company running fiber in my city right now. I'm in an enclave in the center of Los Angeles where my choices currently are Spectrum (200/30Mb), or 25/5Mb from AT&T.
I am going to be so glad to switch away from Spectrum as soon as the fiber is lit. Insane that in a dense area in the center of the second largest city in America it has taken so long to make fiber available. I suspect once this small provider is in, AT&T will rush to get finally start rolling out fiber.
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Funnily enough, there's decades of history in providing both underground and overground infrastructure of all types, including fiber optics, all over the LA region. The local universities are core nodes on Internet 2 and have fiber rings installed. Massive data centers are located near internet backbones all over the city. There's even a 60 story data center in downtown. Earthquakes aren't new problem and it's easily solved with standardized solutions and installation practices. Verizon FiOS (sold to Fronti
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The lack of rollout is purely from lack of competition.
You misspelled the word "profit". Even in large cities, ISPs build out fiber into neighborhoods largely based on how much money the average person in the neighborhood makes. That's why I, living in a mobile home park in the heart of Silicon Valley, have only one usable ISP (Comcast) even though there is fiber only a block away from the entrance to the neighborhood.
If there were enough money to be made, the phone companies would roll out fiber. Instead, they bleed their ever-diminishing number of landline
Ban scare tactics? (Score:2)
This is taking those bullsh*t "Final Notice" sales pitches to a new level of obnoxiousness. While we're banning all kinds of other speech, why not ban this tactic too?
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Fraud isn't condoned by the first amendment.
This is very tenuous, if you ask me (Score:2)
The fact that they did not evidently previously warn him about this unpaid debt puts them on very shaky ground, if you ask me. Unless they can say exactly when the debt was accrued and how much the debt originally was at the time, they won't have even one leg to stand on.
But let's assume for the moment that they can provide that info...
A company certainly has an obligation to try to contact a person to notify them of charges owed before they report them to for it being unpaid debt. How can you accuse
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The fact that they did not evidently previously warn him about this unpaid debt puts them on very shaky ground, if you ask me. Unless they can say exactly when the debt was accrued and how much the debt originally was at the time, they won't have even one leg to stand on.
Gets even shakier:
They're Not Desperate Or Anything (Score:2)
Does anything reek more of desperation than this sort of thinly veiled threat? Best guess is their customer base has collapsed recently, the company is on the verge of becoming insolvent, and they hired some consultant who thought the Prenda model would be a good way to win people back.
Not The First (Score:2)
It was bound to happen (Score:2)
Glad I went with C64
Where is the FTC?! (Score:2)
The FTC was made to kick companies in the ass for pulling this shit. Where is the FTC and why aren't they acting?
Criminals (Score:2)
As a formal Charter employee, the whole organization is full of unethical scoundrels. I've seen so many cover ups working in the network security operations organization it will blow your mind.
Would be doing me a favor (Score:2)
Less credit = less spam.
Notify credit agencies yourself (Score:2)
If they are threatening to report you to credit agencies, when you don't actually owe them anything, report the threat to all the major credit agencies in advance.
If they make good on their threat, such reports would be a bad mark on the reporting company's history, for filing false reports.
Creative interpretation? (Score:2)
It's clear that they're giving customers a chance not to be hounded for the debt that they legally owe Spectrum. Spectrum has no requirement to do this. And it may actually repair these people's credit histories.
It's really annoying when people demonize companies for trying to find a productive solution to problems. Makes it much harder when there is a serious problem we a really need to be addressed, but it's buried under people crying about a company wanting to be actually paid for the services it rendere
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RTFA. The customer called Spectrum to see what the outstanding debt was, and Spectrum reps told him that he had no outstanding obligations.
Blackmail, pure and simple.
Dear Spectrum Legal Department (Score:2)
That's it (Score:2)
Time for people at Spectrum to go to PMITA prison, and for the company to be seized by the federal government and sold off by them.
They really fucked up big time, and I don't want to see the usual slap on the wrist and 5 cents off coupons.
If any government official is reading this, this is your chance to make yourself look real good in the public's eye and cement a nice long political career and retirement.
Please don't post paywalled links... (Score:2)
... with less than a paragraph of content before the shakedown.
Wait... legality? (Score:2)
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Perhaps Spectrum is sending out the letters to the wrong people
Incompetence doesn't excuse their stupidity.
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Neither is a copy of that letter.
For all we know the guy whining at the reporter has the reading comprehension of a rock and misunderstood what the letter actually said and started spazzing out over it.
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Except if those accounts are already in collections, ownership of the debt has been bought by a second company (the collections agency) and Spectrum most likely can't actually do anything further about it. Once that handoff is made, their power to 'make it go away' isn't quite zero, but it takes a math degree to tell the difference from zero. So even their offer to 'forgive and forget' is wildly dishonest.
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Are you that sure? The collections company might be happy to pick up 50 cents on the dollar on a few hundred accounts in a single easy lump sum payment from spectrum.
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I aint no legal critter, but as it has been explained to me by a relative who is - which matched my experience when somebody sleazy tried to pull one over on me - here's how it works:
- Company A has a piece of debt that they want to turn over to a collections agency.
- Collections agency BUYS the legal ownership of that debt for a small portion of face value
- Collections agency is basically making a bet that they can get something out of the debtor greater than the value of the discount purchase price of the
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Your not really wrong, but there's a few more wrinkles:
Although you aren't supposed to, people pay the original creditor ALL THE TIME for debt that has been sold to a collections agency. And while there are PLENTY of horror stories of how this goes wrong, this actually generally works out just fine for most people most of the time, the original creditor can cancel the debt with the collections agency. The exact accounting for this I'm not entirely clear on, whether they forward the funds to the collections
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- Fuck collections agencies, and I say this as somebody who has never been sent to collections.
Yeah nobody likes dealing with collections agencies; not even the business that sell off debts to them. Getting often as little as eight cents on the dollar for work you did sucks! Guess what there are no shortage of sleezballs out there who are perfectly happy to have you do 100s of hours of work on a contract and then find one reason or another not to pay despite all the terms being satisfied. In a lot of cases as business owner you have two options - send them to collections and get something or spend mo
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Except if those accounts are already in collections, ownership of the debt has been bought by a second company (the collections agency) and Spectrum most likely can't actually do anything further about it.
True and good point - this means that Spectrum is lying (or trying to commit fraud) from their own statements to the people they're mailing.
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If you couldn't afford the last 6 months you're unlikely to afford the next 6 months. This is just a way or running up the bill (and boosting their subscriber numbers).
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Except... (Score:5, Informative)
It's not a threat. You /ALREADY/ owe money and are behind. What's going to happen if you don't renew was already the process and expected. You can't call it a threat or extortion because of they offer you a way out.
Except, as the story states, the people Spectrum is mailing don't actually have debt with them:
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The strange thing about this case is the letter doesn't mention a specific debt and he can't get any details of a debt he supposedly owes. To be on the safe side I write a letter stating that I do not believe I owe them any money and asking them to send verification of the debt. I'd also include a copy of the letter they sent me. Send the whole thing to them via certified mail. At that point I can prove that I contacted them if it comes up again and that I asked them provide me information on that debt. If
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The strange thing about this case is the letter doesn't mention a specific debt and he can't get any details of a debt he supposedly owes.
Or, as someone else here pointed out, they (Spectrum's agents) can't currently find any debts.... because Spectrum sold them off to collectors, and they no longer own those debts; which means they're trying to commit fraud by getting people pay the supposed debts (assuming they actually existed in the first place) to them, instead of the collectors, which are the rightful owners of the debts now.
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That's not a threat though, it's a general letter and it doesn't apply to them
You're right - the tactic of saying "Pay us money you don't owe or else...." is properly called extortion (or a "Protection Racket" [wikipedia.org] in the organized crime realm).
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You managed to hit a lot of strawmen with the wrong end of the stick.
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To be fair, a lot of non-American readers probably enjoy these stories for the schadenfreude.