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How To Rack Up $28,000 In Roaming Without Leaving the US
pmbasehore writes "While waiting for his cruise ship to depart, a man decided to use his AT&T wireless card and Slingbox account to watch the Bears vs. Lions football game. When he got his bill, he was slammed with $28,067.31 in 'International Roaming' charges, even though he never left American soil. The bill was finally dropped to $290.65, but only after the media got involved." He might have left the soil (the story says he was already aboard the ship), but shouldn't the dock count?
He might have left the soil (the story says he was already aboard the ship), but shouldn't the dock count?
Which means it is likely he was in internal waters (description here) so unless his contract had a specific clause phrasing "Internal Waters" to be a roaming area then I would assume it is no different than boating out on a lake in Kansas and not subject to roaming charges. Even $290 seems more than a bit steep & unfair.
I'd pay it and change providers but if he's upset, there's always small claims court.
My work here is dung.
The correct answer is ZERO. He was not roaming and there should be no additional charges, other than his monthly access fee.
Even if his usage exceeded what is acceptable for AT&T, there is no provision in the contracts that allow them to assess that kind of penalty.
I would fight it still.
I wonder if there is any danger of this happening to anyone using a mobile near the coast?
And I was told the same thing would happen. While I haven't looked over the breakdown of my bill I was only about 40 dollars more than normal and that included sending several photos and making about a half hour worth of calls from Mexico (which came up on my phone as roaming so I was not surprised)
But there seemed to be no additional charges for the calls and data usage I made from Long Beach, California. My phone never went to a roaming state while I was in port in Long Beach either. So I'm not really seeing how all of this came about or why some people seem to have different experiences with this.
Just for the record this was with Verizon. YMMV. Yadda, yadda yadda.
Also, why can't someone fix this damned text box in Idle? It's really getting old.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I wonder what they charge for the monkey knife fights?
This is fitting for The Consumerist, not Slashdot.
Sure, we nerds like fancy cellular internet connections and, as people, hate to see something like this happen, but it really doesn't belong here.
When I used to live 5 miles from the Canadian boarder I would hear nightmare stories like this all the time. People, despite being in the US would find that their cell was roaming to a Canadian tower because it had a better signal. It was bad then, even before data. Now I can only imagine how horrible it must be.
This is totally AT&T's fault. However, I do understand that their system was recording his data usage according to International rates. How hard would it be to include a small area of text on mobile devices to display your current rate? I've never been a fan of "just use it, we will tell you how much it ended up costing you at the end of the month." He could have avoided a lot of headache if he had known his connection was screwed up when he originally started watching the game.
http://travel.latimes.com/articles/la-tr-insider5nov05
I know this article is a bit old and this might have changed already.
$290.00?
Should have waited and simply bought the Lions with that extra scratch...
Only bigger insult would be if he was pulling for the Lions...
"Murderer? Well, that's a harsh word. I prefer to think of myself as a Mortality Technician."
1.) Why is this guy paying ANYTHING?
2.) How could a few hours of international data service cost that much ?
until people start using Ryanair's new in-flight cell phone system. I can just hear the people whining about how much their calls to the ground cost them.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
But I think the major cellphone providers do this on purpose.
How many of their users would WANT to be able to rack up more than $100 at a single time?
But they give them the opportunity to charge tens of thousands of dollars with one usage.
Logically, they should put a cap on one use, and have the user call and explicity request the cap be removed on a case by case basis, except for super huge millionaires, CEO's, ETC.
I mean, he was watching the Bears vs. the Lions. No network should be forced to even touch that traffic.
IANAL... But I play one on
The wireless provider obviously needs to do something about how much credit they issue people. Nobody is going to pay a $28,000 bill for cell phone usage.
There's a certain segment of people around here that like to play up "personal responsibility". What they often fail to address is the responsibility works both ways. Letting someone rack up a bill on the order of 1000x normal is utterly irresponsible of the provider.
AccountKiller
....aren't they 12 miles out from shore? If the cell phone company can claim that, then all gambling ships would be able to exist by just having their ships docked.
I would fight this provision of the contract to the point that I paid no more than my regular monthly average.
If you think about it, the cell phone company is saying that if I stepped a few feet into the ocean and made a call they could charge me with international rates.
Sillier notion yet...
If this also were the case, other countries would use this as a loop hole to say hay, America I'm here with guns pointed at you and you can't touch me from your soil because I'm standing in 2 feet of water from your borders and I'm in international waters.
Ok, that's way overly extreme, and just out there, but it was fun to think that extreme. I figure a few of you wouldn't mind the laugh.
I am realsilly, after all.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
This pisses me off to no end. As a stockholder, I *really* hate reading that AT&T has gouged another one. Seriously.
BUT, isn't there a clause or statement in the TOS that says streaming video is a no-no?
I had a sucky sig.
I live near the US border in Canada and my phone often prioritizes or switches to American providers since Canadian providers seem to have little to no support at the edges of the country. When I was younger, I'd accidentally made a few calls while connected to the American providers and those were costly. My provider refunded me the difference, walked me through disabling roaming (or Home Only option) and told me if I ever did it again I'd have to pay for it.
A little known fact, U.S. Territory extends 200 miles off the shore.
The ISP should be fined.
From the article, he was billed at 2 cents/kbyte, which is $20/Mbyte. Based on this rate, and the bill amount of $28,067, he used about 1.4GB of bandwidth. The article says he watched a single game of American football, so assuming that took about 3 hours, the connection speed is about a megabyte/sec, which means that it was billed at... $1,200 per minute.
Under common law, if you request a service for which payment is customary, you are obligated to pay any, even if you were not told that payment was expected or what the price is. The common example is that if you go to a restaurant and order food, you incur a debt even if you never looked at the menu. However, this is only the case when the price charged is "reasonable". A restaurant cannot unexpectedly give you a $1000 bill after you have ordered, even if that price was printed on the menu, and expect payment. While sellers have considerable leeway in defining what is a reasonable price, no court could possibly find that $1,200/minute was a reasonable price for consumer data service anywhere. Therefore, he is not obligated to pay, and if AT&T took him to court over it, they would lose.
They "accidentally" (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) turn on their satellite relay system while in port. I wonder how many people wandering around the port "accidentally" connect to that system and inadvertently put a few dollars in the pocket of the cruise line? This guy caught it because the amount was so high, but how many people wouldn't notice a small charge for a short phone call?
You went through all that effort for a Bears Lions game? This spoken from a long suffering Bears fan. In Chicago, we don't have quarterback controversies; we have quarterback dilemmas.
Given that the U.S. claims to own all of the oceans extending 200 miles beyond the coast, I'm pretty sure that the man was still considered on U.S. property.
As I suspected, TFA says he was connected to the ship's cell network, which should not have been operational while it was docked.
Exactly what I was thinking too, though I wondered how that could be performant enough to watch video...
So it's not just me having horrible experiences with AT&T, then
Say what? If the ships cell network is not supposed to be on while docked, why would it be AT&T in charge of enabling that? It would be the ship operators. I'd complain to the cruise line.
I've had most of the cell phone providers at this point and they all sometimes are really good, and sometimes really stink. But we should blame them for things they are actually in charge of!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I was actually going to post about the fucking article but now I see this is idle bullshit. Why is this fucking window still scruched up? Why can't they use the normal posting pages instead of creating a custom gimptarded piece of shit for Idle? What purpose could it possibly serve aside from making Idle feel even more useless than it already is?
Fuckitty fucking fuck!
As for what I was planning to ask, "Why the hell are cell data plans so expensive to begin with?" The fucking SMS messages are 20 cents on my carrier. I know the idea is that you're a captive audience and can be fucked as the provider feels is warranted just like they can charge you $8 for a beer in a sports park but seriously, where can we draw a line?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I am not a lawyer
And neither are you.
i use verizon's evdo to surf the web on my laptop when on metronorth trains going up and down the hudson river. the connection is usually good, but every once in awhile, the connection would completely die, even though my phone was indicating i had a good signal. i started noticing this would happen when there was some yacht out on the hudson nearby. i thought perhaps my phone was roaming over to some cell transponder on the yacht?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I heard from a very unreliable source, the reason why gambling on riverboats was deemed legal in some states. Apparently these states had laws that banned gambling in the land or the soil of $state. Since these boats were not on the land but on water gambling there could not be banned. So technically the AT&T lawyer could argue that he has left the US of A the moment he boarded the ship. It should be obvious by now, IANAL.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The real root of the problem is the fact that he felt the need to watch the Bears vs Lions, he should be forced to pay the bill in full!
If the guy's cell was connected to the proper cellsite his data would have probably gone over some form of landline or microwave link back to the backbone. Instead because the ship turned on their equipment early it went out over their ocean-serving satellite which is a much more limited resource. Seems to me that the higher bill is PARTIALLY justified, but that it should go to the company responsible for the employee who turned on the equipment. Still, I don't think the prices they charge for data roaming are ever really justified, at that price they could send someone out in a helicopter with the game on DVD.
First an 0-16 season and now this. Can Detroit catch a break?
It looks like I need to change my SSN, (and the combination on my luggage).
Who would want to watch a bears-lions game? I don't believe it.
Here in Victoria BC if i am down on the beach facing Seattle, i'll get a txt message saying "welcome to the US!" then if i use my blackberry i am charged international rates. i called Rogers there is "nothing they can do"
it IS a technical problem, one that works out in the cellphone companies favor though, so they don't really have much interest in fixing it i imagine.
I had an almost identical experience with Verizon assuring me (sales rep & store manager at the physical store + Verizon servicedroid on the phone) that Canada is included in the plan I chose. The *reason* I chose that plan was to give a 2nd phone to one of my associates, so she could talk to partners in Canada. We got the phones, she started talking to folks in Canada, I checked the account weekly to make sure there are no extra chages (being a responsible customer and all that).
Next month, I get a neat little SMS stating "Your Verizon bill is ready online... balance is $ 3,479.00". Holy $%^&. Their excuse was that they had no idea those charges were accumulating, and that's why they didn't show up in my account (which I was checking weekly). OK, I understand a delay of 24-48 hours... possibly a week... but a MONTH? What are they using for billing info transmission, pack mules???
It took 17 phone calls totaling over 9 hours to sort it out & reduce it to around $ 700 (back-dating an international plan, etc.). Which I paid, and vowed to NEVER deal with Verizon again.
So, it's not only AT&T that plays merry hell with billing practices, other carriers are guilty of that too.
I would like to ask Verizon 2 rhetorical questions:
1.) What's the point of having an online account system that doesn't show international charges - not a DAY later, not a WEEK later, but only for the next billing period? I was especially amused by the "Top 10 Most Expensive Calls" feature - which was $ 0.00 every time I checked.
2.) Why would multiple people in the company LIE about a particular plan feature to a customer who explicitly states that they will definitely use the heck out of that feature? They're setting themselves up for problems.
Verizon: can you hear THIS now? Jackasses.
You obviously didn't read the article.
The customer was using a data card, not a phone. Data cards do not have displays. They have a light that tells you when you're connected, and that's it.
The common response to this seems to be to want the government to step in. Other than maybe requiring a "plain english" TOS the government has no place here. The customer, or mark in this case, should vote with his wallet and switch to another service provider. Failing that, he should be as much of a pain in the ass to their customer service people as possible. A company will respond faster to lost profit than they will to government regulation. And, as with cable television "franchise charges", they'll just pass the cost of the reg. on to the consumer.
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The cruise ship company caused this situation by having their micro-cell system turned on at the dock. This basically created an unlicensed cell, operating inside the US.
The FCC should hit them with a large fine for this.
I'm shocked they reduced the bill. AT&T's official policy is never to credit roaming charges because that's money they paid to another carrier.
This also indicates a blatant flaw in the design of data cards, is that they are not capable of being a phone. These devices need to be redesigned or come with software that replicates the functionality of a phone while plugged into the PC. That is the receipt of SMS and "you are being called/make a call" via a softphone like on a smartphone. Doesn't the software indicate the network it's on ? Ignorance shouldn't get you out of paying the bill.
And chances are he's used at least 5 years worth of goodwill credit, I wouldn't be surprised if they cancel his service if he ever tries to dispute a charge again.
All the phones I've had, do indeed display the company that owns the tower that I'm connected to. However, because domestic roaming is free, there is no reason to pay any attention to it. In rural areas it is extremely common for only two companies (one GSM and one CDMA) to have a tower along a given stretch of highway. I've never traveled abroad, so I don't know if it is displayed any different. Furthermore, whose to say that this satellite uplink system wasn't being run by ATT?
Lastly, he was using a data card, not a phone - you plug them into your laptop and use it like it was a modem. The software that came with the card that my uncle had did not display this information prominently - you had to explicitly bring up the advanced status page to see it.
Yup - I had a similar problem with a child running up an SMS bill by not realizing that a friend they were sending messages to wasn't covered by their unlimited plan.
My issue is that the first notice I'd gotten of the problem was 1.5 months after the problem started - when almost two months of excessive charges had been rung up. The Verizon CSR of course wasn't willing to do anything about it (even though this wasn't even a roaming issue - it was all on their network). For what those charges cost me we could have paid for a year of an unlimited plan.
I'm fine with paying for services that are used. The problem is that the services are designed to trap people into paying more than they planned. You have x # of free minutes/messages/whatever, and then suddenly your charges shoot way up, and there is no way to set a limit so that you don't go over the cliff. Data plans are sold and there is no way to put limits on spending. It is often impossible to get realtime data on consumption of service.
Even "courtesy" SMS messages like the ones mentioned in this article seem to be designed more to cover the provider and force you to pay the bill than to help you to control your spending.
A cell phone plan isn't some kind of game. Let me decide what I want and what I don't want. Charge me for what I want, and don't charge me for what I don't want. I'm fine with having a call dropped when I pass the 700 minute mark or whatever (as long as it isn't 911 - which is just common sense and is easy to implement). If these kinds of features were available I'm sure that 99.999% of consumers would take advantage of them. They should really be the default. Any service that a consumer wants should be explicitly sold to them, with a hard limit. The consumer should be told exactly what the plan will cost them at minimum and at maximum before they sign on the line.
We also had phone service with them for a bit. When I set it up, I specifically asked for unlimited calling to Canada, and was assured it was on the plan. I called back again for another reason, and was again assured that I had unlimited calling to Canada. Next month's bill? $1200. They had not added unlimited calling to Canada. It took me about a half-dozen calls to sort it out, during which time I was told that it was impossible for me to talk to anyone who was capable of modifying my bill, because "they don't have phone numbers."
Until you see it on paper, don't assume it is the case. I have made the same mistake, of not having it in writing, and what you have in writing trumps what ever the company may later say verbally. Something else also worth doing, once suggested by a phone operator, is getting the reference of the operator, so if you do have issues you can specify who game you the information.
With this attitude I now ask for any operator trying to sell me something I may be interested in to send me the details in writing, and only then will I consider signing up for the service. I don't like pressure selling tactics.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Burdick's cellular connection which he thought was connected (though a datacard) to AT&T's network. Unfortunately for Burdick he was actually connected to the ship's onboard network, which accounts for the international roaming, and his datacard was unable to display the repeated warnings that AT&T kept sending him over SMS.
Maybe if you are savvy enough to setup a slingbox, you should be savvy enough to make sure you are logged into the proper network before downloading a shitload of data.
Just a thought...
I see this quite frequently with some idiot asking how he couldn't determine that he was roaming.
First off as the Stinking Summary Says. He was using a Wireless Data Card (Modem) in his laptop not a damn phone.The big question I have to ask is why his bill was so high to begin with because with a data plan, he shouldn't have been able to connect at all through the ships phone network. Simply put, they don't have enough bandwidth to support data usage. The other thing is who screwed up and activated the system while the ship was in port?
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
I love it how the typical slashdot users misses the most glaring issue. It has nothing to do with the roaming or international waters or the bill amount.
It's the flippin' loser who is watching the Bears versus the Lions while on a cruise ship.
To me the most likely explanation is that the ship it's self had its own AT&T antennas with an uplink so that no matter how far off the coast the ship was you could use your cell or broadband card. Since he was on the ship, he connected to the shipped based system and either the system isn't smart enough to know where it actually is physically located for billing purposes or was malfunctioning and thought they where out to see or in another country.
In building towers and repeaters are nothing new, I had perfect signal in Boston last week when I was in a tunnel underwater. Just proves they will build out anywhere, anywhere that it will make them lots of money or someplace where there is lots of traffic, and international roaming is one of those places.
Why don't we have some kind of "meter" on our phones which tells us how much our call costs? How many minutes we have left? If I saw I was being charged $1 a minute I would definitely hang up.
The same thing can happen when you are close to the border. Here in San Diego, you can be near TJ and pick up their cell towers and end up roaming. At the same time, you can be in TJ and still make calls using U.S. towers. You have to be pretty close to the border though.
The cruise ships have there own cell towers within the ship. You could be driving by the ship in your car and switch over to the ships international cell tower for a moment and you would never even know.
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
As they see it, it isn't in their best interests to let you be responsible. They make their money off of you going over, not from the plan.
Voting them all out of office, now that's change I can believe in.
How would one know when they were about to be charged for roaming? I've never encountered this, but I do also use prepaid cellular.
He was watching the LIONS? They should pay him!
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
that's a really expensive way to watch the Detroit Lions get their asses handed to them again, as they continued to do for the entire season. What a way to go.. 0-16. They lost the whole damn season. :D
He should have known the Bears were going to win anyway.
So, AT&T actually creates a system that becomes "aware" of huge charges being racked up, and warns the customer.
Everything that people do, they do for two reasons: the reason they tell others, and the real reason, which they keep to themselves.
The ostensible point of such a system is to be able to say (in advertisements as well as in court), "Hey, we care about our customers, we'll actually warn them if they're over-spending."
The REAL point of such a system would have been to PREVENT those charges in the first place:
Customer is racking up $ 10 / minute (or w/e other amount well above average)? Sure, send a few warning messages first. But then, if you actually want to prevent the problem, CUT OFF access and display a message that REQUIRES confirmation. Make the customer call service & ask what happened. At which point they'll tell him, "hey Joe Customer, we noticed that you were running up hundreds of dollars in charges, so we warned you [twice-10 times] and then we cut off the connection, since we didn't want to bankrupt you." At which point Joe Customer will realize that something *did* go wrong, but thanks to the company actually *enforcing* the ostensible goodwill intent of this system, they had prevented a major disaster.
And AT&T would have had a customer for life. Instead, they have this.
However, AT&T utterly failed to make this system actually *work* in all circumstances (data cards... phone is off, 2nd device on account is running up a bill... teenager on family plan calling a 1-900 line in Tokyo... area code scams... 9000+ more possible scenarios.)
Minor win for taking a step in the right direction (warning messages). Verizon doesn't even do that.
Epic fail for not taking this measure to its logical conclusion (don't warn, prevent problems).
In my experience running the customer service department of a major company (not related to telecom in any way), I've seen at least one example per day (on a good day) of people NOT reading warnings, NOT following instructions, clicking on confirmation dialogs without reading them, and generally behaving like biomass. This applies to customers, reps, and managers, BTW. So in order to prevent problems, measures must be taken to specifically disallow a dangerous action unless that action's consequences have been explained, understood, and confirmed.
The only way to build a truly reliable and secure process is to rely on logic, not on people "doing the right thing".
The only way to build a truly great relationship with customers is to not let them screw up. And of course, acknowledge your own screw-ups (and fix them).
A customer may get ticked off at the additional security / verification steps at the moment, but they'll thank you later.
And if your CSR's know what they're doing, and explain the risks up-front, they customer won't even be ticked off to begin with. Win-win.
"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." (C) Dennis Miller.
I hope he had permission from the NFL to internationally re-broadcast a game.
If not $29,000 is going to be spit in the bucket compared to how the NFL is going to dig in his ass!
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion, you must set yourself on fire.
I have an AT&T datacard and I know they *do* receive SMSes. What they don't do is actively force you to look at them the way a phone does. The datacard application does permit you to look at your SMSes whenever you want.
Likewise, if you are on the beach or even worse, actually in the water on a boat, you will generally not get a strong signal from a provider on land as most towers are not positioned to send signal over the water. Most customers happen to be on the land, so that is where they want to position for.
This is why all phones display a roaming indicator, if you show that you are roaming, then you shouldn't be using the phone if you don't want to pay...
Xaotik Designs
I used to work for T-Mobile and this is how ship-board usage goes: Anytime you are near a cruise ship you are more than likely going to transfer your connection over to the ship as soon as you get within a few hundred yards of the ship. This is because the ship has a huge fricking transceiver on it and wants your connection so they can ream you. My first tip here is (if you plan to travel or by chance live near a border) set your network selection to manual. this will lock your connection to your home service until you lose it, then you will have to manually select another available network. In all the time that I did tech support for T-Mob, I have never heard of any regulations saying that ships have to turn off their transmitter in ANY port, so make sure that you know how to view and select a network on your own phone, no ships deck hand is going to come and show you how. Next up, unless you have an international data plan (which are almost exclusively Black Berry plans) or bought a SIM card that includes data for the country you are visiting, turn off your data connection entirely. Just about every cell provider has all rates posted on their website at the very least, they will hold you accountable for charges even if you never looked them up. The cell companies have fleets of lawyers who would all tell you that ignorance is no longer an excuse to breach a contractual agreement, even if you agreed by phone nowadays.
Any customer service rep should tell you about that if you called them first, primarily so that after they tell you the rate in your destination country you won't call back to complain once you get home. Most foreign countries (with T-Mob) range from .07 to 2.99 per minute but cruise ships always charge 3.99/min, do the math. ATT was already charged that amount by the cruise ship company and paid it in the customer's name.
Your best bet is to get an unlocked GSM phone that accepts SIM cards, 3G if you're going to Japan or Korea, tri or quad band for anywhere else, and get yourself a local SIM card once you get there or over the internet. Any respectable cell company should give circumstantial consideration if you're still in a US (or other local port) but don't expect it on principal. Cell companies can usually track your usage from one tower to the next to see if you're picking up the wrong towers (border cases) but ships move, making any kind of corrections, or even objections, very difficult to research and correct.
The US claims 20 miles of water off the coast as "US Property" hence the whole Territorial Waters thing with Drug Smugglers, etc...
It is a quasi legal, at best, designation.
What it is similar to is "brown foot" (any of you sailors will know what I mean)...as opposed to wet-foot or dry-foot...
So AT&T is just trying to get an extra buck or two...
AT&T loves this...my cell phone was stolen and used for internet access, I got over $5k in charges...they dropped them because it was stolen...but the internet service is only worth $19 a month...so how can they justify $5k or any number above $19 for internet use?
What if, like this guy, you were being charged $2 a second? I would probably smash by phone with the nearest heavy object.
Who won?!
we once had an employee using a cell phone as a modem in Mexico rack up a $10000 bill in one month. She said she didn't understand how the billing worked, so she had left it online so she could chat on MSN... she could have called each person from the same phone for MUCH less!
http://www.AmherstburgVisionCentre.com
Verizon does offer that service under parental controles. It is an additional 4.99 a month.
Fear the power of NTie!
Paying a fee to not be charged for a service that a consumer doesn't even want seems like a ripoff to me. This isn't even just about "parental control" of a child - it is about control over the account itself. If I'm not interested in anything that would give me a bill more than $20 over the typical monthly rate I should be able to state this to the phone company and they should respect my wishes.
The whole cell phone system seems to be designed to get you to accidentally spend more than you planned. That just isn't acceptable. Sure, advertise ringtones out the wazoo and try to get me to buy them - but don't sucker me into paying for something I didn't even realize I'm ordering.