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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."
You charged me exactly what it said in the contract I signed said you would! How dare you.
I would think that in the interests of PR, AT&T might send you a text or something when you go international roaming and pass some threshold of use, just to warn you. But really, if you pay extra to call Canada long distance, don't you think your cell phone/data card would work the same way?
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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 $1000 and warns them?
Why not? I'll tell you why. Because this is how the world works. But I'm still disgusted.
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This sort of thing has been going on for decades with cell phones and roaming. It is all too easy to get hosed by unexpected charges. They really should be forced to inform you anytime the fees on a call will exceed 10 times your normal per minute fee BEFORE connecting the call or in this case Internet connection.
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Too bad that our FCC does NOT require reasonable access and reasonable charges on OUR public airwaves.
Instead, the FCC whores out our frequencies for billions of dollars, and we then get re-charged for using those frequencies. What a crock of shit.
Question: How much did the roaming agreement with that "roaming carrier" cost AT&T? 10$? 100$? ... Free (peering agreement)?
You charged me exactly what it said in the contract I signed said you would! How dare you.
I expect that in a world where most either read their contracts in great detail (and are sufficiently educated to understand the ramifications) or refused to sign anything that took them more than a minute to read, this would work out great. I'm not sure which plan you're advocating, though, and I expect either plan would actually impede carrier sales.
I would think that in the interests of PR, AT&T might send you a text or something when you go international roaming and pass some threshold of use, just to warn you. But really, if you pay extra to call Canada long distance, don't you think your cell phone/data card would work the same way?
I think the particularly telling piece of information is that if you want a plan where they do limit your charges and notify you when you reach thresholds.... you have to pay extra. They're called prepaid plans, and there are no surprises (well, within limits), but for common use cases, it's guaranteed you'll pay 2-4 times the amount a customer on a given rate plan will.
Why the cell phone companies can't combine the limits on prepaid plans with conventional rate plans is an interesting question, but I suspect the answer is not a technical limitation.
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Isn't there a common law rule about contracts that "unconscionable" clauses are not enforceable? There is no way a sane person would agree to purchase services at these prices or anticipate this level of charges. It's like ordering "a bottle of red" at The Olive Garden and getting a rare 1940 barolo priced at $20,000.
That's nonsense. It's not disabled by default on all ATT phones. In this case, we're talking about a data card, but it's the same point. You don't have to call to turn it on. I've seen two instances recently where people got hit for 7000 and 9000 bills, with no change in usage behavior. Some folk troubled inside can sneer at these people and justify their disdain behind the fact that an 26-page agreement lists roaming data charges in fine print. These same agreements also say you've signed away half your legal rights because ATT would find them inconvenient in certain situations. Fuck that as a justification. There are tons of cellular service providers that have much better warning systems, like a text or pop-up with fee information, or tools you can use, like self-setting a limit on how much costs you can incur before service temporarily disables. There's no reason why people in this day and age shouldn't expect more. Casual data use goes up every year as files and options take up space, yet somehow it always seems that those with few competitors seem to continually put off revising their rates for networks long paid for. This was Canada in 2008, not Sierra Leone in 1998. The most galling thing of it all is the proof right in what puto is saying. We all know that all that stands between a $20,000 bill and a $100 bill is a fucking SKU. They design the circumstances to encourage these mistakes, or they just don't care enough about their customers to deploy solutions already on other providers' shelves.
Most people, though, simply do not grok how much data a short video or a few dozen lightly compressed photos use up, though. It's not like voice, where everyone understands what a minute is. A few minutes on a data call can transfer just a few kilobytes, or possibly tens of megabytes - and most people who aren't IT people or telecommunications experts simply don't understand this.
It would be more customer-friendly to by default have the international roaming plan bar calls once the charges reach, say, $100 - instead of let people who aren't IT experts unexpectedly run up gigantic data bills.
That's before we get to the rip-off profiteering that is international roaming.
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... that the mobile carriers could save themselves a great deal of grief if they provided a fact sheet to their data subscribers. Sure, the contract said $0.019 per KB, but most people have no idea what that means. Now, if they handed them a sheet like the following:
...
Here are some typical charges at $0.019/KB
1 email would cost about $0.02 to send or receive
1 web page would cost about $0.20 to display
1 3.2 megapixel picture would cost $6 to send
1 10 megapixel picture would cost $20 to send
1 minute of DV video would cost $5200 to send
In other words, express the charges in terms of something they can understand. I'm sure if this family was given a fee schedule like this they would have suggested that their son not send home the pictures.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Yes, because everyone needs to be treated like a two year-old. No, we can't expect people to act like adults and be responsible for their own actions.
Real grown-up responsibility has more than a watch-out-for-yourself component. There's both an individual and a social component.
And a reasonably convincing case to be made that among others, most cell carriers don't take enough responsibility in helping people signing contracts understand the whole thing. Or that a reasonable person would find it highly surprising there are corners of the covered terms of service which if you wander into can subject you to fees 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than your conventional bill.
Think about it this way: when the people in question got the data service, do you really think they *never* asked what the service cost? It's highly unlikely. What is highly likely is that they asked, got the standard answer about the most common usage, and were simply not informed about the additional usage fees. They took an incomplete answer as a complete one.
You can argue that the contract is a complete answer, but here we have a problem: contracts are not intended to be effective vehicles for communicating terms of agreement to consumers, they're designed to be effective vehicles for specifying terms to the legal machinery. If you want to argue that the contract is the answer, you may as well argue the source code of a piece of software serves as a FAQ or Manual.
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As I've said elsewhere in the thread, expecting contracts to serve as effective communication to the customer is like expecting source code of a program to serve as a FAQ or a manual.
Contracts are not really intended for (nor good at) effective communication of agreement terms to a customer. Especially when drafted entirely by the legal department of one side agreement, their purpose is something else entirely, which is to communicate those terms to the legal system (and, maximize the interests of the side that drafts them under the fullest extent possible under the law).
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I'm used to no sympathy from AT&T people. This is why I haven't done business with them for 10 years, except for when AT&T bought Cingular, and then I left the day my contract expired.
If someone slapped me and my family with 200 pages of paper, no matter what is printed on them, I'd be filing assault charges.
This is the kind of thing that should be covered by a user's bill of rights. Fair play and fair thinking in business is something we all have a right to expect. We have lemon laws for cars, and consequently have the right to think we'll be treated fairly by telephone companies. That we often are not is evidence of cause for legal action.
We'll get there, and instances of stupidity like this will push the line in the sand. Think about it, my bank calls me to make sure I really want to spend money on my card if it is outside the norms of my usual activity. Why would phone companies not also do this? ..... exactly.
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How much does it "cost" ATT to pay for that kind of bandwidth? 20 cents? 1 cent? This is theft, grand theft, 20 grand theft - 20 cents for the actual cost of course. On what basis is it justifiable for a corporation to make that kind of profit? Comrade Lenin had it right.
Actually, you're not far wrong. By default the iPhone disables international data roaming, you have to explicitly tell it you want to use data when not on your home network.
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I've had calls from my bank's fraud department when they see a spike in, say, clothing purchases at department stores -- because I hardly EVER do that.
If they can call me because charges amounting to less than 10% of what flies in and out of my account roll through over a weekend -- not just because of how much, but because of /where/ -- AT&T sure as hell could flag an account that is fast approaching 50 times normal usage in the space of 24 hours.
It's pretty funny seeing you guys talk about this as if it's a novelty! "Pay as you go" is very common in the UK and has been for at least 8 years. For the levels of usage that I used to have as a student, a contract wasn't worth it - especially as contracts back then only gave you about 100 free texts a month, unless you wanted to pay crazy money.
which is totally what she said
Exactly. It is definitely not a technical limitation, but designed to enhance profits.
I am always irked when I travel to a new city, spend $60 on my VISA card, and am called 5 minutes later for a "fraud alert" early warning. Or, better yet, dine in a restaurant in another city and have it "declined for my safety" due to unusual activity.
For any of you guys saying "Oh, this is good," remember this is designed to protect the Credit Card company, not you. Almost all cards limit your responsibility to $50 for fraudulent transactions. You can rest assured if you were responsible for your own well being, as in the case outlined, you would not get an early warning. Similarly, there is no financial incentive to do so in the case of AT&T above, who can now harass the customer to pay a huge amount of money, and then look "generous" to let them off with only a couple of hundred dollars in fees.
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Steve Jobs did nothing.
What?!? Do you mean to tell me that the president of the company that made the phone refused to help with a bill from the carrier? Why how selfish of him not to intervene in a dispute that didn't involve Apple!
The real litigious bastards...
Abuse the rules? Umm the contract stipulated the charges, its not ATTs fault the customer ran up time and got an automated bill for 19 grand.
They advertised 'Stay connected whether you are traveling across town, the U.S., or the world' but hid deep in the contract that it'll cost you 100 times more. You have a strange definition of abuse if that doesn't qualify.
You can get unlimited plans but they cost more money. I think what you want is an unlimited everything, worldwide plan for $20. I would like bread to cost a dime. I do not see that happening.
I don't think that is what anyone is asking for. Reasonable charges is what I would be asking for. Let's say you have an iPhone with a contract in the USA and you take it to France. I'd say a _reasonable_ charge would be the same monthly charge as a French customer would have paid on top of your normal US charge. And an alert popping up before you start getting charged informing you of the situation and giving you the choice of accepting the fees or not using the phone. Or lets say I have a data plan costing £20 per month for up to 3GB. Now if I got charged another £20 if I exceed the limit (with a new limit of 6GB), that would be reasonable. But charging £1 per Megabyte = £3,000 for the next 3GB, that is entirely unreasonable.
Kids figure this because they have no reason not to.
When AT&T uses terms like unlimited, Nation wide, etc. people take it as it seems. Then when you get a phone that allows you to do something, they assume they can and bingo, $1000 phone bill.
All phones should warn you when you use a feature that is not in your plan. If AT&T says they can't do it, they are full of shit.
Is it that simple? Will that make it go away? You won't just get jailed and still have to pay it (and maybe much more?)
But yes, one would hope they would find it unreasonable themself and not charge it.
So, you believe everyone should sell you things at their cost?
Mind telling us where you got that figure? Oh, that's right - you just made it up.
And then summon moral outrage at a fictitious markup - *very* nice!
Yeah, we should all be able to just decide what we want to pay - that's only fair.
Let me guess, you're a high school or college student in your "teh Man is oppressing us!" phase?