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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."
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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What planet are are you from? One where it really is OK to charge 6 months wages to send email using a system in use by millions of people.
Its a sign the markets aren't competitive, the corporations immoral and some individuals so brainwashed that they blame the victim.
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.
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.
Tweet, tweet.
It does NOT cost $20,000 to send a few megabytes of data on a network in use by millions. No telecomm bill for a single, consumer grade line should be allowed to be billed at that rate.
Good-bye