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Telcom Fraud: The Previous Generation
theodp writes "Remember back in the day when telcom firms were charged with simple, good old-fashioned consumer fraud? AT&T and Lucent got a history lesson Friday, agreeing to a $300 million settlement related to claims that they used confusing billing statements to mislead consumers into paying lease charges for their home telephones, including the timeless rotary Traditional, that totaled many times more than the actual value of the phones."
My parents had one of those rotary phones that they "leased" from the phone company. Must have paid for it 20 times with the number of years they were had it.
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
Wow what's going to happen in the future as the sharing of information becomes even more integrated into society?
The Telcom Industry - yet another possible source of a large-scale collapse of civilization as we (might) know it.
Technology can be so depressing at times...
Hey, I see some marketing potential here...
"On the next episode of 'Telcom Fraud: The Previous Generation'.."
slashdot!=valid HTML
But this is really really old news. I'm surprised that anyone would still be motivated to go after something like this. (Well, except for a law firm that would get the cut.) The money certainly is a bit of a punishment for AT&T. But what, are we actually going to see money from this? This really wasn't worth going after, for the average guy.
BTW: I really am considering getting a rotary with a big-ass ringer back in the house. Those were the bomb. And it'll keep the kiddies away from the phone -- they won't know how to use it!
Cable companies charging a $15 rental fee/month for cable modem rentals...
Aw, fuck it. Let's go bowling. - The Big Lebowski
Just another example of big business getting rich off of screwing people. But not as bad as MicroShaft, because not only do you have to pay for the ass ramming, but an additional fee is assessed each time they ram you.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
The "confusing" billing statements were mailed to residents of Palm Beach County?
"All art is quite useless." -- Oscar Wilde
Just got a class action notice the other day from Verizon wireless. It said essentially "if you do nothing, you'll receive some coupons worth $10 - $20, and give up your right to receive settlement. Or you have to send a opt-out letter to provided address to participate in class action settlement".
I don't know what piece of legislation allow companies to do this. It is better for consumer that settlement is opt-out (do nothing and you'll participate in settlement).
Of course I actually send my name address to opt-in to this particular settlement. Darn thing that postal service raised postage again I end up using 2 32cent stamps.
Somehow I'll be had...
--- You make things foolproof, and they'll find you a damn fool.
If memory serves me, the cable company (I think Comcast) is still charging my parents for a cable box they leased from them back in the early 80s. And the remote to it. Sure, its only like $2 a month or something, but for 20 YEARS? Needless to say, the remote is long lost, and the box has been 'destroyed' (via disassembly and reassembly).
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I'm 20, and I have and use a rotary phone that my grandfather used to own. This makes me (just about?) the youngest person on the planet with one of those. I swear, it must weigh 10 pounds and is built like a sherman tank - it must be 90% metal.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Well great, so a practice that appears questionable at best is coming to a close.
Here's my problem with the universe of class action lawsuits: out of this $300 million, the lawyers are going to take 30% or so. This is a tidy little sum. The people who were gouged are going to end up with not-so-much relative to the amounts they were "overbilled". Probably less than the inflation-adjusted price of a Princess telephone.
The article even mentions that some of the settlement money comes in the form of calling cards donated to charity. This doesn't remediate the damage to the class in any way whatsoever, but it does help to pump the total value of the settlement (and hence the total value of 30% of the settlement.)
The class-action phenomena is great for lawyers who can come up with new and innovative reasons to sue companies for large sums of money.
Where it's abused, they cost all of us (the end users) a little bit of money, earn the litigators a lot of money, and often accomplish nothing more than what could be accomplished with a press conference or two to bring pressure on the company to stop.
Perhaps I am just growing cynical.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My mom leased one of our phones in the house for like 20 years. IT was a fun deal. It was like 25 cents a month, and they couldnt raise it because the contrat was so old. We used to drag on of their poor linemen out ther every couple of months cause the dog chewed through the phone, and they had to replace it free. Serves em right.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
When I had Road Runner, I exchanged their modem about 4 times in a year. Had I bought that same modem, I'd have been out of service for who knows how long. Instead, I walzed on over one block to the local Time Warner office, and got me a new one each time.
The minute I can get a reliable cable modem for $20 anywhere, I'll provide my own if so allowed.
The lawyers' fee was.
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
spread-spectrum, peer routed, networking system for all communications to eliminate central points of collapse.
Anybody who doesn't read their bill before paying it is a jackass anyway. I look over my credit card bill every time...same for phone bill just to make sure. I've had to call the phone company a couple of times because of calls that I know were not made, and they dropped them from the bill.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
It's good to see this issue finally resolved, but this isn't the limit of the sleeziness of AT&T et al. Equally as disturbing as the phone lease charges addressed in this suit, is the ongoing bilking of cutomers who don't keep up on service plans and pricing opportunities. Many elderly customers (including, my grandparents, as I duscovered a few years back) are still recieving service at AT&T's base rates, from the late '70s, without the advantage of any of the pricing plans currently available upon request from all long distance carriers. Certainly the argument that it is the customer's responsibility to investigate pricing opportunities, is not without weight, but there are AT&T customers still recieving Pro Watts service, which in my case I discovered, then I tried to dial an 888 number from my grand parents redidence. Upon review of their bill, and with one 5 minute phone call, their bill was reduced by almost 70%, but the carriers are under no oblication to move customers to any particular rate plan at any time, and because the customer demographic which includes senior-citizens does not demonstrate elasticity in their telephone calling patterns, such that regardless of pricing, they will likely make the same amount of calls; there is no incentive on the part of carriers to offer them any more modern pricing plans. This is particularly interesting because over the past 20 years, it has been common opinion within the telecom industry that as market pressures drive pricing for basic calling services down, that refenue differential will be recouped through the pricision of more advanced services such as caller-ID, 3-way calling, distinctive ring, and so on.
At some point it will no longer be cost effective to treat their customer base in these two wildly divergent ways, and telecom carriers will be forced to bring their pricing into allignment elderly customers, althoufh this will have the down side of pringing down on these customers, that deluge of telemarketing calls from competing providers - a joy to whih they have been to some degree spared thus far.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
I think the term is either Telco or Telecom, but not Telcom.
As a side note, remember way back when you could actually dial a number, and it would ring your phone? I think it was something like 057-and then your phone number, or something like that.
We had a rotary phone in our house until it was fashionable for people to have those new fandangled cordless phones.
He had had that phone since the 1940s. He 'rented' it every month - it was one of those old, huge, black rotary phones. I can imagine he's paid well over a few hundred (if not over a thousand) dollars over the years for it.
"I'll sell you a pair of dimes for a quarter" and Harpo buys several.
20*2*12=$480 for a cable box worth around half of that at the time it was originally installed is a bargain, actually. It is the equivalent of a 20-year $240 loan at a meager 6.2% interest rate!
They could have bought their own freaking box long ago, but chose not to probably just out of complacency. But it won't surprise me one bit when some money-grubbing lawyer claims they've been 'wronged' and sues the cable company for a 'small' $100 million fee.
For some style tips, check out this question and the one a few down about improving karma.
I keep getting billed for a pay site:
0900 GOATSE
What the fuck is that about? No one where I live is confessing to ring it.
"I think not, they'll pin the entire problem on your faulty modem."
Sounds just like the computer industry. Womder how they get away with it?
I like how the phone companies used to charge extra money for touch tone dialing. Nevermind that it saved the phone companies millions, if not billions, of dollars per year. Shouldn't they be charging people to use pulse dialing? It's good that things like this don't still happen. Do they?
You didn't have to rent the phones as of like 1970 something. Even then you didn't have to have a phone line. People did get along without phones at one point. Turning of power to a heart patient at home that operates his artificial heart is one thing. Charging a lot to rent something to you is well perfectly ok thing to do.
Our we now going to sue the credit cards because that $99 dvd player actually cost me $130 because it took me a year to pay it off? Are we going to sue Rent-A-Center because the people didn't know that 19.95 a week for 5 years is way to much to pay for a stereo that only costs $300...hmm
Some people are idiots and they deserve what they get,, no reason to pander to their stupidity.
Ah, there it is, in all its pink glory... The Princess-phone! How I have longed to possess one of these beauties, how I have sought for its rare splendor, no price's too high for this baby...
Yet Qwest is still doing what they have been doing for the past several years.
I rather like how they handle the situation, have shitty customer / telecom service, get fined, go to court, negotiate w/ govt, say that they will add more phone / data lines to rural areas (which they were already planning to do anyways), get their fines reduced and pay almost nothing.
That and piss away shareholder money like a college student at a kegger, forcibly switch their dsl customers to MSN, and sell your personal information.
Same shit, bigger pile methinks.
(perhaps I'm still a little bitter about the whole msn thing)
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Just watch the ad spot for AT&T digital cable, where they try to dispute the second "Digital cable is much more expensive" "rumor"... Digital cable, by their own admittance, is $69.99 per month, or over twice the price of basic...
What part of "more than twice the price" doesn't translate as "much more expensive" in any sense of the term? Sounds like fraud and false advertising to me...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I recently had a huge problem with Wired Magazine. I've paid through Jan04 - their subscription site says so - yet the site says "Your account is paid and active, but we are awaiting your renewal payment" - showing a payment due of $12!
Not only that, but I got a letter from a fucking collection agency - on a bill for a VOLUNTARY magazine subscription DUE IN JANUARY OF 2004! If they try docking my credit, I'm so suing...
Angrily worded letter is on the way as we speak...
Four years ago I signed up with a local and long distance phone company called Econophone. One of the new breed of de-regulated, privatized competing phone service providers, they were offering rates for local and long-distance calls well below half what AT&T was, and still significantly cheaper than Verizon.
I used them successfully for two years, and paid very little for phone service. 5 cents a minute national long distance and comprable local rates.
How, you ask? De-regulation, which happened under Clinton in the mid '90's. However, once de-regulated, the baby bells immediately began testing the resolve of the federal regulators to force them to deal fairly with their "client competitors" for local & long distance service. You see, they wanted the good parts about de-regulation (being able to diversify, charge whatever they wanted, etc.) but not the bad parts (actually having to give up their monopoly status). They fought tooth and nail battles over various regulations and did their level best to kill their competitors... by bribing regulators to get call-completion charges, by systematically failing to service their new clients properly, and, now and again, by slamming their customers.
Clinton's people were going to stick it out and fight the bells into submission. The Bush people had a more, shall we say laissez faire attitude about it, and the last two years have all but brought about the end of competition among the bells, first as the feds looked the other way while they turned their embrace with their competition deadly, and now as the FCC is actually going to rubber stamp their new "pseudo-monopoly" status, enshrining the notion that bells need not lease their lines to anyone, just like they already did with cable.
Econophone is bankrupt. Many of you remeber the Northpoint fiasco; Econophone was very similar. Not content with stealing their customers and bludgeoning them to death with sabotaged service, the bells had to make a show of violently disconnecting them from the network, without warning. The message: don't deal with the independents. You just never know what might happen to your calls.
This industry makes billions of dollars a week. They are _printing money_. Their margins are _incredible_, and that's with some of the worlds most notorious bureaucracies. I've dealt with AT they just _hemorrhage_ money. Why not? They get paid most every time someone makes a call.
De-regulation was a failure. Not exactly because it was inevitable, but because it was never really intended as anything but ideological cover for more and better price fixing. $5/mo for call waiting service anyone? Or how about $3.50 for _not_ publishing your number in the phone book?
You might say the little carriers like econophone went out of busines because they didn't charge enough. But I don't think those people made a math error when they founded their company and calculated what they could charge. I think we got a brief glimps of what we _should_ have been paying all along, before the Bells furiously covered it up.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
But part of the settlement (I am assuming here) must only apply to the US, considering how much they're screwing our UK schools. Not sure on how the rest of the world fares, but I bet they recoup their losses either way.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
As I recall, they tried to do exactly that and everyone screamed bloody murder that it would just be handing them another monopoly, since it would increase their presence in education (much to the dismay of Apple and others), an area where their monopoly is not nearly as strong as it is in other market segments.
It's 1996, and the bells have been newly de-regulated. They're pleased as hell, because they can diversify, but more importantly, because they can now charge whatever they want - price gouging galore! Time to raise the price of call waiting!
There was only one pesky problem. The bells were now theoretically obligated to "compete" with other carriers. The nerve! Wasn't everyone informed that they don't share their playground? Wasting no time, they immediately set to work on the FCC and congress to try to roll back the regulations (or at least the enforcement regime) that allowed competitors to re-sell some of the network and compete.
They came up with a great idea. Oh, it was a real doozy, and very simple. They convinced the feds to allow them to charge a "call completion" fee.
It works like this. If a customer in one local phone company calls the customer of another, the originating carrier has to pay a fee to the receiving carrier for "completing" the call. This, reasoned the bells, was *it.* Who can start up a competing local carrier, if (since they're new) every call from their customers terminates at a bell-controlled phone, and they're saddled with 3c fees for every call! It's a classic "screwing the little guy with the power of math" scenario.
It was a perfect plan. And it only had one fatal flaw.
The metropolitan ISPs of New York City were some of the phone company's most enthusiastic enemies. And why not? Have you ever tried to get the NYC Bell to do anything more complex than a residential hookup? How about manaing hundreds of lines in a hunt chain... let me tell you. You lose a few every few months for no discernable reason, and during one of your dozen hour-long calls to the bell for support, you discover that in trying to "fix" your hunt, they've now disconnected your office phones as well. True story.
The NYC ISPs were desperate to deal with someone, _ANYONE_ other than the local bell. So what did they do? They got together with a tiny, unknown little local carrier. And they became its first, and practically only, customers.
And do you know what happened then?
ISPs need lots of lines, and they're willing, nay desperate, to pay a premium for any kind of service exceeding the Soviet-block standard of the bell. They hardly ever make any calls out. But everyone calls an ISP. In fact, they get thousands and thousands of calls a day.
Within days of getting their first 8 figure "call completion" bill from the tiny little independent local phone company (that the bells had just been gloating over murdering), the bells were back in Washington, and back in court, desperate to break the deal.
Now, exercise for the reader: where they successul in weaseling out of it? What do you think?
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
That you can buy your fill of rotary phones for 5 to 10 dollars US, that means that they were able to actually charge MANY times more per month than the damn things were actually worth.
Another class action settlement. No doubt this will be like most others in which consumers get nothing but the recognition they've been cheated (and maybe a 75 cent check), and a few lawyers get to buy cliff houses in Miami.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Every month the baby bells (all 3 1/2 of them!) make millions of dollars from fraudulent charges. You might not notice a couple dollars of bogus skim here and there, and the occasional big "mistake" every few years that you clear up after hours on a voicemail merry-go-round, but small ISPs go through thousands of dollars of billing errors nearly every month. That's not even mentioning the "taxes" that the telcos include on your bill that never actually make it to the government, which are legal.
Isn't that meant to be Telecom?
Note that comparatively tiny Lucent actually had to pay money in its part of the settlement.
well done!
myself: it's 4am, i can't find my midi cables and it's too late(early?) to play the real instruments, thus no recording tonight.
c'mon folks, gimme some good comments to read.
thanks
I look forward to the day when we can direct-dial via point-to-point links through user-owned wireless, bypassing the monopolies. Bloodsuckers will get what's coming to them...
In Canada, Telus, Telus Mobility, and Microcell (Fido) automatically (and I do mean automatically) call thier customers every six months and let them know that, based on the customers usage, they are on the best cell plan/long distance plan/whatever. And if they are not, will recommend one that fits more into thier usage patterns.
I think it's the whole cupon strategy, if clients think thier saving $0.10, they'll spend an extra dollar. I wonder how it's worked out for them, personally, I appreicate it.
-In the event that you disagree with the previous comment, be advised that you are most likely right anyway.
I just can't understand why anyone would want to lease a phone. Now a complex piece of software that is a whole diffrent story. It make sense to lease an operating system or an office suite.
I don't suppose this could be setting a precident or anything?
Well, actually, that would result in a discount, albeit a small one. Assume the original price is p and the advertised percent markdown is f. Then the internal price (before the markdown) would be p'=p(1+f) and the sale price would be p''=p'(1-f)=p(1+f)(1-f), which of course is p(1-f^2). For f > 0, p'' < p... but by much less than the advertised amount.
(So, the really said thing is, I formatted those equations by hand in HTML. Ugh.)
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The annoying thing about cordless phones is that you wonder randomly around the house, talking to the phone, and then eventually put the phone down somewhere. Then you go back to whatever you were doing and after some time find out that you have no idea where the damn phone is. When it has a cord you'll just end up strangling yourself with the cord, but hey, you don't lose the phone!
http://saveie6.com/
Ok, here's what this is about. Some people just realized that they have been paying the phone company every month to lease telephone equipment. Over the years, they've paid many times what the phone itself was really worth.
And?
If you've walked into a store anytime in the last 20 years, you would find that you can, in fact, purchase your very own telephone and don't need to continue to rent one from the phone company. And even if you continued to rent the telephone, you're not just renting the particular phone sitting in your house but also buying protection from that phone breaking. If it does break, the phone company will supply you with another one.
This should be filed under "Oh, come on!"
It's just that the power company bundles it into the minimum billing fee, without dummying you up. Same with the water company.
If AT&T had raised the minimum bill, they could have lent you the phone for nothing, and wiped out the secondary phone market. And we'd still be renting them.
Next time you see an older telephone in Canada, flip it over and see if it has a "Property of Bell Canada" sticker on the bottom. If it does, warn its owner.
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
fine, but just understand that the hole billonlyUS fairytail "economy" is FraUDuleNT bs designed to help make a handful of felons, & "OUR" "elected represeNTatives" immune from the legal systern, while leading J. Public into decades of unpayabull debt.
do you know where what's left of your money is going today?
whois tallying the score when you type in (free to paid subscribers?) the conteNTs of your "dream portfolio"?
In 1996 I was the last person in my exchange with rotary service. After years of letters from NYNEX begging me to switch, for a nominal fee of about $4/month they finally cracked and just gave it to me. I refused to pay a charge for a service they had instituted in 1963 and had probably amortized by 33 years later. Apparently it cost them far more than $4/month to maintain the rotary crossbars for only one customer in the exchange.
It is my one small victory agains the MAN.
Same idea, these probably cost a lot less than face value
Of course they cost a lot less than face value, otherwise AT&T wouldn't make any money by selling them.
but they count toward the nice fat grand total...
They should. As any high school student can tell you, just because it doesn't cost AT&T much to make a product doesn't decrease the product's value.
Your argument sound like you'd rather have AT&T pay cash to some class action lawyers, rather than provide a charity with something they need.
I'm sorry of I sound like I'm defending the monolithic phone giant. I'm really sick of idiots, and that's basically what they are, if they can't get past a "confusing" phone bill.
Furthermore, they've been confused at these bills for almost 20 years, and now finally figure it out? I'm sorry if I have no sympathy for people who:
1. Don't read their phone bills, or are too stupid to figure it out.
2. Don't get any clarification of the charges they are paying
3. Decide after 20 years of ineptitude, to sue.
even if you plan to have the modem for a while, such that the cost of buying is significantly lower than the cost of renting ... well ... between two households (college students livin' the life outside the dorms) we've had the cable modems in each replaced at least once ... maybe twice. good thing we rented -- lightning, network problem, modem decides not to be part of the network, modem decides to never authenticate again, etc. ... renting's been good for us. and for us, it's ... $10/mo. on top of $40/mo for the service.
... with no useful upgrades available in our area ... (charter communications, oklahoma)
the bandwith caps suck, though
De-regulation, which happened under Clinton in the mid '90's
Things like deregulation happen because of Congress, not the president. Hmm, what changed in Congress, in the early 90s?
Clinton had no interest in deregulation. A Republican Congress did.
But you're still paying extra for the phone company to provide a service that costs them less money! It's about time to switch that around and charge rotary customers (aside from grandfathering current customers) extra instead of Touch-Tone users.
Of course this will never happen, since they already consider it part of the regular phone fee, and writing it up as an extra service is just a billing formality. Rotary customers are so rare these days that they can afford to eat the extra costs.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
They'd make a killing...oh, hang on...
If telephone charges were applied to property, you would have to buy the house AND rent it, then pay an additional charge every time you wanted to use a room, and it would be more expensive to use the same room at different times of the day, e.g. the bedroom would be twice as expensive at night as during the day.
How they've got away with it this long escapes me. Not only do you pay for the line to be installed and buy the phone, you then have to pay line rental and call charges. Is it just me or have I just paid for the same thing four times?
I am worried that I will get terminally downmodded to negative karma even if I try to post better replies from now on. Actually, it appears that I am already down to -1.
I know I am slightly off-topic, but a lot of people here seem to be intersted in making points by replying to topics they have no knowledge about. I will wait till there is a topic I can confidently make a good post about.
Cheers.
This is a tidy little sum. The people who were gouged are going to end up with not-so-much relative to the amounts they were "overbilled".
Which is a fair amount more than they would have had if the lawyers hadn't done the footwork.
Don't get me wrong, I'll grouse about lawyers' jackpots just as much as the next guy--but lawyers do work for their money, and most of them don't get windfall cases like this one. A database administrator is just as likely, in most cases, to make a salary competitive with a lawyer; but we don't complain that the DBA makes too much. Add to that the fact that lawyers do have a significant place within our society. I don't have statistics for how many of our current Supreme Court justices practiced law before they became judges, but I'd make a bet that all nine of them did.
I'd rather see lawyers make the money than professional athletes. Two or three generations, what do we have to show for the hundreds of millions of dollars we wasted on them?
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
I remember after my grandmother died, she left the house to my parents, and when their first phone bill arrived it had a monthly 50 dollar charge for using an AT&T phone. The phone was one of those huge wall mounted phones that was touchtone in an ugly 60's yellow. The phone must have been there for twenty years at least. It just amazed me how a phone that could not have costed more then $25 was charged so much for. We called our local phone company and asked to return it, and they had no idea what to do with it and finally told us to send it away to some place. If you think of al the money my poor grandmother could have saved if she wasn't taken advantage of.
I think the phone companies still charge a premium for touch tone capabilities. This technology was first introduced in 1962.
Hmmm... so why isn't the CIT group part of this settlement? CIT bought Newcourt Credit Group and Newcourt Credit Group bought AT&T Capital Leasing. That was the actual part of the AT&T devolution that handled the phone leases.
I guess it is true that if you change your name enough, you can fool the lawyers. How many stories on Enron fail to mention Accenture's part of the fiasco? After all, you don't think that Enron built all of those Internet trading systems without consultants and the accompanying conflict of interest.
Try to add something informative to the discussion, especially if you make a link to another article, or show moderators something they didn't know, in a polite way, you are likely to get positive mods. By the way you're still posting at 0, so there is hope. If you add nothing to the conversations post it anonymously.
Pay several times the value of something, by leasing it...
Hey, does that sound like 'Software Assurance' to anyone else?
Listen, try not to believe everything the Corporate mouth-pieces spit out there. They publicize a few big and puzzling awards and exaggerate other legitimate awards to make their points.7 08 9
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=110
There goal is simply to get legislative action on limiting liability on corporate "persons", hamstringing the ability of juries of actual "persons" to punish negligence.
Tort reform is a fake issue, brought about solely through paid corporate propaganda.
I purchased a Princess phone for the kitchen at a "Sale" advertized by AT&T at their phone center. I had it for ten years. When I called to cancel my phone service because I was moving the clerk reminded me to return the Princess phone. I was stunned. I told her I payed $30 for it at a phone sale. She said "check the light gray print on the back side of your bill of sale." In print so light you could barely read it was the word 'lease', even though the front was 'sales' invoice. This lawsuite is punishment for that kind of deceptive business practice. They got their phone back. Every component was taken apart and reduced to its minimum parts, all were put into the box, except for the screws and nuts, throughly shaken, and the box was taken to the company, sealed up. I left with my refund, they had "their" phone.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
This issue has been going on for a long time. The cable companies do the same thing. I have to pay monthly rental charges on my cable converter and my cable modem. I think the only difference is that I went into the contract with the knowledge that I was being ripped off, whereas this legal case makes the clain that the customers were unaware of the practice.
About 6 months after the class action lawsuit, they sent me a notice in my bill which stated that if I did nothing, then I would automatically lose my right to be a member of any class action suits against them. Further use of my card would be considered my consent to such changes. If I wished to retain my right to participate in any future class action suits, send a letter with a specific phrase in it, to an address other than the normal billing address. Responses sent in the included payment envelope would not be valid. A little information card (too small to fit my information legibly) had to be filled out and included with the letter.
I jumped through their hoops, including writing a letter stating that I wouldn't willingly give up my rights. About 6 months later, here comes another notice that they are going to remove my class action rights unless I jump through hoops again. I once again sent them a letter that I wanted to retain my rights to participate in class action suits.
Recently, I received yet another of these arbitration agreement/class action exclusion letters (just do nothing... your rights will e automatically removed). I thought about sending them a letter stating I was serving notice to them that from then on, my interest rate would be 0.0% and that their sending me a bill the next month would constitute their acceptance of my terms, but I figured that after being forced to pay back millions of bucks they probably don't have any sense of humor.
I don't see how it can be legitimate to require customers to repeatedly opt out losing their rights. The whole sordid affair seems like a good candidate for another class action lawsuit, but the persons most affected have lost their rights to class action redress.
I'm an individual! Just like everyone else!
Funny, but many of the Previous Generation *of people* did not understand the concept of leasing or rental (basic money skills, for sure); it was just accepted that if you want a phone, you paid what they told you or go without because the Phone Company would disconnect you. The phone was not viewed as a necessity but a convenience, so Bell was free to charge or do whatever they wanted according to Government.
Did you ever see the dire warnings about not connecting non-bell equipment to their lines?
Have you *read* their tomes of technical jargon to convince people how "advanced" and difficult their networks were? (granted, switching and logistics were advanced, but not the local loop technology)
If you thought we'd learned our lessons, look how many people lease their *Auto* today without good reason; I am sure many only see the "monthly payment" part of the equation and not the total cost.
Until recently, my grandma has been renting old rotary telephones from the local Bell, dating to 1972. The phones were leased for something like $5 a month per phone (two phones total). She refused to give them up, saying "if they aren't broke, why fix them?" and felt she had no business pleading with the phone company to lower her rate. I called Bell personally, asking why the heck they are ripping my grandma off for all these years. I told them in all, she has payed over $1800 per phone over the last 30 years. They agreed that it was expensive, and decided to let her keep the phones at no additional cost (gee, how nice).
The sad thing is, they still work...
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
I worked in accounts receivable for Lucent back in 1998, dealing with small business accounts. It's simply amazing how many of these business customers never bothered reading their bills. The only thing we found effective on getting customers to stop leasing or paying maintenance contracts on old, outdated equipment (including rotary phones) was by raising the monthly rate to the point where the customer would call in. We'd point them over to sales and ask them if they'd prefer to buy the equipment they already had (I have no idea what they were charged, if anything), upgrade to a new system, or continue the lease.
Surprisingly, there were customers who chose to continue the overpriced lease on outdated equipment.
I also encountered a few cases where some customer or another would be paying maintenance fees on rotary phones, and then the company would finally get someone to look at the books or they'd rotate in a new IT person, and we'd get a call. "What's this? Maintenance on a rotary phone? We threw those out back in '89 when we moved." "I'm sorry, ma'am, I can remove it from the account but I can't refund the charges." I could see where they were coming from, but they should have been READING THE BILL for the past 10 years.
I'd have to say that Avaya will probably get hit with a lot of the charges from this settlement, as Lucent doesn't really deal with telephones anymore...I worked for the division that later became Avaya. Of course, by that point, my contract was up and I was long gone, just like the rest of the permanent employees at our office.
A couple of years ago, I brought a rotary phone into my office at my last college, and the phone system accepted my long distance authorization code!
While I do feel sorry for those who've been paying those ridiculous monthly leases, buying the old, klunky, reliable WE phone was one of the best deals I've ever made.