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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."
And this is tagged "apple" why?
This is not about an iPhone just because it's about AT&T.
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 $1000 and warns them?
Why not? I'll tell you why. Because this is how the world works. But I'm still disgusted.
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You know AT&T is going to abuse the rules. Bring along some CDs to burn and mail home next time.
This sort of thing has been going on for decades with cell phones and roaming. It is all too easy to get hosed by unexpected charges. They really should be forced to inform you anytime the fees on a call will exceed 10 times your normal per minute fee BEFORE connecting the call or in this case Internet connection.
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The branding "Aircard" is close enough to "Airport" some readers may assume it refers to Apple equipment instead of stuff manufactured by Sierra Wireless.
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Too bad that our FCC does NOT require reasonable access and reasonable charges on OUR public airwaves.
Instead, the FCC whores out our frequencies for billions of dollars, and we then get re-charged for using those frequencies. What a crock of shit.
Question: How much did the roaming agreement with that "roaming carrier" cost AT&T? 10$? 100$? ... Free (peering agreement)?
The iPhone, at least, has a "Disable Data Roaming" option... of course, they probably had that clue shoved down their throats by Apple. :)
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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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The AirCard allows users to connect to e-mail, the Internet and business applications while traveling, according to AT&T's Web site. On the Terry family's bill, they were charged international fees for the service.
The Terry family said they asked an AT&T employee about the service before their son left the country. They said they were told nothing about international fees.
Did they even ask about international fees?
From the AT&T website about their plan.
So figure, $20k @ 1.5 cents a KB he transfered about a Gig. Looking at the video some of the sessions were a few hundred megs so I really can't find AT&T all that much at fault here that they didn't check the rates.
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Roaming in other countries is not automactially enabled on the phones. Including Canada. You have to call and request it. The rep will try and sell you an add on plan that will make it less expensive while you are there, for calls or data, and then when you refuse they note they account. For when situations like this happen. Most people will not pay an extra ten bucks to cut the costs into 1/10 and figure they will only minimally use the phone. This always happens with kids. Kids figure they are home, and use the phone, and data card, like they are sitting in the computer room. You know what, send the pics when you get home, internet cafes are cheap, and the last thing i do when i am away from home is surf the web
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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).
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Why can't mobile phones (& GPRS modem software for that matter) have the ability to pre-warn you how much the call is going to cost per minute before you press the dial button?
When you buy a product from a bricks'n'mortar or online store you're told up-front how much it's going to cost before you get out your cash/credit card/PayPal password
But not with mobile phones, usually you're either told just after the call ends how much credit you have left on your pay-as-you-go account or at the end of the month when your contract bill arrives in the post.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
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.
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.
... 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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Then at 0.15cents, it should be 10x what you said, or 10G... unless he was doing some heavy torrenting, I doubt that adds up. 1Gb itself is quite a bit of data for an aircard/evdo thing to do, as slow as they are. And with only 21 uses of it, thats a good bit of data: ~51Mb per session avg., which with normal speeds around 200k, ~25KB/s, would be 34Mins of constant full bandwidth usage per session, 12Hrs total, but probably 3-4x or more that time realistically.
Granted, I do not agree that its "AT&T's responsibility" to notify them that the card is seeing usage, but it probably is in AT&T's best interest to avoid problems like this, or what the family suggested: stolen card.
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Others who remember this also read Slashdot... At a previous company I worked at a 19,000 page bill was received for a test device. This device sent an SMS Test message every 5 minutes. The bill came in and actually itemized every single SMS message(which was free).
The Bill: 65 bucks, arrived via UPS and the carrier was ATT. Don't ever expect this company to do the right thing(notify you of your monster bill).
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.
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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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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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.
Actually, T-Mobile does. It's called Flexpay, and your service gets cut off (at least for the rest of the billing cycle) when you reach your limit. And they have the same plans that normal postpaid accounts do. You can even buy your phone at full retail price and not even have a contract. You can cancel at any time.
I'm not sure why the other companies do that. I suspect T-Mobile does cause their the little guy, and they need the customers.
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.
Why don't phones show you, in a clear, unambiguous area on the display (not buried 6 menus deep) exactly how much you will owe on your next bill? Or in the case of prepaid plans, how much is left on the plan? Most companies have a service where you can send a text to a certain number, which you have to remember (and pay for). So, they seem technically able to figure this number out in realtime. Why not show it to you by default?
(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!)
That might have something to do with the fact that T-Mobile is a European carrier, the mobile arm of Germany's Deutsche Telekom.
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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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.
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.
Last Xmas we went back to the UK to see family. We live in NYC. My wife has an iPhone and uses it religiously. She hit $1000 pretty easily in the UK, but at that point ATT sent us a text, and cut off the data service, leaving the voice service on.
That seemed a pretty sensible default to me.
Similarly, when I had a UK cell phone with Vodafone on vacation I've received messages asking me to call to confirm my high phone usage and charges when I hit 2-3 hundred pounds sterling (~$500 maybe).
I can't imagine why ATT didn't alert them in this case.
I recently went away on a 7 day cruise to Bermuda. The first thing I noticed is how outrageously expensive Internet access on the ship was.... like $50+ for 2 hours! So I had to stay off the Internet.
My mom always has to call our aunt every few days, since she's checking up on the house and getting our mail. So she made 3 phone calls... each about 10 minutes long while the ship was at sea. And guess what happened at the end of the month? They charged us $25 for each call we made. The total - for about 30 minutes of phone calls - was over $75 dollars!!! FOR 3 PHONE CALLS.
Some of the people we saw on the ship - especially younger people - were talking on cell phones almost the whole trip. If any of them had AT&T and didn't understand their service contracts....
It's plain stupid. $75 for 3 calls.
Obviously world wide doesn't cover Canada. damn Canadians
I must also chime in and say you're misinformed, at least for roaming within North America. I live on San Juan Island, WA, just across the Haro Strait from Victoria BC, and my cell phone often switches over to the BC Rogers cell across the water with no change in functionality -- and I have never called AT&T to "enable" any such roaming technology, it simply does it automatically. In fact, I have to be very cautious with my billing statements to make sure that AT&T isn't busy trying to slip a ton of extra charges in there for maintaining a cell tower here on the island that's so underpowered I wind up getting the one next door instead.
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