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."
I blame the fine print. They are so verbose that you could be agreeing to anything.
My family was one of the many caught up in the original AT&T / Cingular Merger, and promptly quit them after we found out we couldn't add my little brother onto our current (read: old AT&T) cell plan (which was $20 per phone per month) unless the entire family got whole new phones and went on a new two-year contract.
Well, we did... with T-mobile.
Fast forward to now and almost the entire family has upgraded their phones since -- only one person at a time as opposed to en masse -- and my sister and I are happy as clams with Sidekicks, and even when I traveled to Canada, it never got nuts like this. (In fact, the one thing my boyfriend likes about T-mobile is that when he was traipsing all over Europe, you couldn't swing a charge cable around without hitting a T-mobile tower, so be enjoyed as-good-as-home data service!)
So... yeah, not surprised.
I guess that about 30% of the carriers' revenue in US are such 'oh shit' charges (on a lesser scale, of course).
throw new SuccessException("Sig read successfully");
Roaming is something of a scandal over here in the EU, where we pay astonishing fees to use our phones a couple of hundred miles away with the same company we're signed on to at home. The European Commission has acted against roaming charges before now.
In a similar case recently, a woman was charged £4900(c. US$10000 at the time) by Vodafone because she used a 3g internet connection to watch the Apprentice on iPlayer from France. Vodafone waived the charges in the end.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
AT&T is no longer the old AT&T, because the name was sold to SBC. My understanding is that the SBC trademark was worse than useless because the company is so abusive. So, the managers decided to use another name.
Those interested in how that happened can watch Stephen Colbert explain in a 1 minute 14 second video: The New AT&T.
I don't think giving someone notice once their monthly phone bill is approaching $1000 due to a handful of glorified roaming charges is "treating them like a two-year old".
Rational people aren't going to think that sending an email is going to cost them thousands of dollar just because they're out of the country. It's email, for crying out loud.
Imagine getting a receipt at a restaurant for thousands of dollars due to a few tea refills. If you're ordering some sort of special tea that costs that much, you'd expect someone to tell you, right? Would you accept it if they pointed to some fine print at the bottom of the back of the menu?
Now, from the article:
It looks like AT&T is going to be sensible about this. That's a good thing. Remember how people kill people, and sometimes themselves? Getting fine-printed into thousands of dollars of debt is one of the things that can cause that. They'll probably kick it down to something the family is actually able to pay without selling their house or draining their kids' college funds.
I thought cell phones ran credit checks... don't customers have a credit limit like a credit card would have? Why are the telcos allowing such huge overages over what plan you are credit approved for? They know your credit score and reasonable limit,why are they not following that on these cell plans?
This is like the old-school days when mechanics would have you sign to "fix" your car, then replace the parts with 10x what they costed and huge labor costs then not let you have your car back... in response we passed law saying they had to tell you charges BEFORE work started and return the used parts. Expecting telcos to honor the credit checks they perform should be expected as ethical behavior.
It is because it isn't costing them the 20 grand if the customer doesn't pay. They do a credit check because they are giving you the loan of the phone, which is paid off over time. Their marginal costs for the 20k worth of service was minuscule (i am guessing pennies) so it isn't necessary to cut the service to prevent a bigger loss. If they pay, great pure profit; if they don't, they are out a couple pennies.
I received a bill for £10,115 in February this year from T-Mobile UK.
I travel extensively for my work, and have regularly hit my "credit cap", which I believe is around the £600 mark. This normally entails paying the bill two or three times a month over the phone to keep outbound service (and GPRS - when I am switched to incoming only, my service is restricted to GSM, so mail stops coming to my BlackBerry).
I have had bills of £2000-£3000/month before, but this was astronomical and wholly unexpected. It turns out that it was almost all data usage (about £350/day), and it was the GPS application on my BlackBerry (8800) downloading map data on the fly. The BlackBerry GPS app and Google Maps do not cache maps on your handheld, and will run in the background if merely "exited" as opposed to "closed", so beware!
My response was to ask why my "credit cap" hadn't kicked in, and the explanation offered was that partner networks do not provide daily updates on roaming data use, instead providing weekly or monthly totals - i.e. T-Mobile didn't know how much I had run up until the end of the month.
I stated my position clearly - that I would not pay, I would attend a court if they attempted to force me to pay, I would not retain a lawyer and the entirety of my defence would be: "They want £10,000 for one months service".
I explained that I would, if pushed, demonstrate that these were disproportionate charges, and the repercussions of bringing such a case against me could be severe.
I displayed my intent by emailing recordings of my conversations with customer reps to Jim Hyde, the MD of T-Mobile UK, which included such gems as "Well you are entitled to a discount on data within the EU, but that obviously doesn't include Brussels."
We settled for £3,500.
I then made it my business to find a contract which includes unlimited international data.
Not one of the UK networks will offer this in a consumer tariff, and in the end it was only O2 who said to me: "Oh you can add that as a "Bolt-On" to any business contract for £20/month.
No other company offers anything like unlimited roaming data, and I was shocked at how cheap it was to do. It has slashed my bills by literally thousands of pounds, to say nothing of the savings on hotel and airport internet.
As an aside, O2 is the UK partner network for the iPhone - but there is no iPhone "business" tariff that will allow you to bolt on international roaming as I have done with the BlackBerry. Not too troubling until they provide above-board tethering anyway.
And as a final note, will somebody please sort out the £ sign when posting from the AJAX box!
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle
The funny thing is that the guy was in Vancouver, so he was using Rogers. Rogers charges Americans roaming in Canada LESS for data than they charge Canadians who are not roaming.
The bill would have been MUCH higher if he lived in Vancouver.
Having a phone is nearly a necessity for the modern world (how do you call out sick when you can't place calls?), and often a landline just does not cut it (need to be locatable 24/7?), unless you want to have both a landline and a pager (plus, what good is a pager when fortress phones are getting harder and harder to find?).
I think there should be some legal restrictions to discourage the excessive use of "fine print." (For example: All wording on a contract must be legible to someone with 20/20 vision at a distance of two feet, or the contract is not enforceable.) A silly law? Well, yes, but when corporations choose to behave in a silly way, the only way to try to maintain some semblance of fairness is usually through silly laws.
(While we're on the subject, how about requiring contracts to be at a 12th-grade reading level or below to be enforceable? "Use a dictionary," "ask your English-major friend for clarification," you say? I say, "Oh, miss Cingular rep handing me something to sign, go fetch a dictionary for me, pronto. And, while you're away from your desk, I'm going to borrow your phone to call an English major I know." On a computer, you might have a dictionary at your disposal 24/7---in real life, you should not be expected to carry one for day-to-day affairs if you have a high-school level of education!)
If the legal term for signing a contract is going to continue to be "contract negotiation," rather than "bending over and letting a corporation stick it to you without any lube," I would like more emphasis on the *negotiation*.
"Okay, miss Cingular rep. Now, I'll sign your paper if you'll sign mine saying that, before you charge me more than 50% above my minimum monthly pay ment, someone from Cingular is expected to receive confirmation from me *in writing* that I acknowledge and am fully aware of the additional charges. See, this is called NEGOTIATION. You have your terms, I have mine."
Oh, attn large corporations: you would not have to re-invent yourselves as "the new ____" (ex. the new AT&T) if people felt they could trust "the old ____." Let your PR branch drool over that for a while, eh?
[Disclaimer: I am very careful about signing contracts, and have been known to (inadvertently) annoy whoever is asking me to sign something for hours and hours on end until they clarify every detail of the fine print. I have not yet reached the point of asking if I can tape record their explanations of the fine print, but that's just because I have not yet been forced to that point! *g*]
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Are there any other parts of living where something that usually costs 60 dollars per month can suddenly balloon out to 20,000 dollars per month without explicit user intervention? Even credit cards call you when usage patterns start looking strange.
Of course, the real problem is that people are getting *horribly* overcharged for international data roaming. I'm sorry, AT&T charges twenty dollars per MB in Canada. Telus charges just 1.7 dollars, and that's considered ripping off. AT&T charges Thirty dollars per MB in the UK, whereas Vodafone charges between 1c and 2 dollars (depending on plan). I don't care if an AT&T representative is taking a personal flight to London for each customer, setting up their wireless network, getting a few too many pints outside the Tate Modern, and flying back, it shouldn't have a 10,000% markup.
Personally, I think that by law users should have to opt-in to these ridiculous international rates while being shown what competing costs in that territory are and how to contact those vendors. Rates like these are just abusing the system to make a buck (or 20 thousand).
The ______ Agenda