Slashdot Mirror
AT&T Slaps Family With a $19,370 Cell Phone Bill
theodp writes "Mama, don't let your babies send e-mail and photos from Vancouver. A Portland family racked up nearly $20,000 in charges on their AT&T bill after their son headed north to Vancouver and used a laptop with an AirCard twenty-one times to send photos and e-mails back home. The family said they wished they would have received some kind of warning before receiving their chock-full-of-international-fees 200-page bill in the mail for $19,370. Guess they didn't read the fine print in that 'Stay connected whether you are traveling across town, the US, or the world' AT&T AirCard pitch. Hey, at least it wasn't $85,000."
Some people here will undoubtedly react in this topic, saying that this family "brought it onto themselves" or "should have read this or that".
I'm saying I'm disgusted, utterly disgusted how these companies treat their customers. Why isn't there a procedure in place that calls the customer upon reaching some limit like $500 or $1000 and warns them?
Since when did personal responsibility jump the shark? I mean yea it's not very nice of AT&T but jesus christ people stop blaming those Big Evil Corporations when you screw up.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
they would NEVER get that kind payment from me, i would start tossing bills in the trash if they got over 200 dollars, i know not everyone can get away with it but i can...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
"I guess that about 30% of the..."
I guess you're a fucking idiot. I'll bet you I'm a lot closer to the truth then you are. Why not just say "I have no fucking clue what I'm talking about so take what I have to say with a grain of salt..." so any other idiots like you on Slashdot won't actually assume you know what you are talking about? While I'm on it, why do people feel the need to pull statistics out of their ass when they try to make a point on a forum?
They should have to pay their phone bill. Seriously. AT&T isn't making any money by charging them roaming to cover their time on Bell Mobility. Bell Mobility is fucking expensive. They should have done their homework. Fuck 'em.
Help us build a better map!
... whenever you arrive in a new state.
The French, Germans and Belgians may want the European Union to be The United States of Europe but there's a whole bunch of folks who don't.
When I travel to a new country I get an annoying SMS message that I delete. It doesn't tell me that the cell phone service providers are running a cartel and will be ripping me off for every phone call or data connection I make to their network.
What I can't understand is that it costs the phone company nickels and dimes to switch 100s of 1000s of calls every second. Yet they charge me about ten orders of magnitude above their costs.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
You're a fucking idiot.
--Toll_Free