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Verizon Wireless To Issue $90 Million In Refunds
tekgoblin writes "Verizon Wireless had somehow been charging customers extra money on their bills for data that they actually hadn't been using. Approximately 15 million customers were affected by the billing error. According to BGR the FCC had been pressuring Verizon to respond to the hundreds of complaints that had been piling up. So Verizon's answer was to refund all of the overcharged money as soon as possible."
At least their answer was to issue refunds.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
If you RTFA, it actually says the overages were caused by "built in applications" such as web features on the phone put there by verizon, and then charged $1.99 for 1MB of data used despite it being merely a few kilobytes downloaded.
Also, the majority of customers will be receiving Credits instead of an actual refund. So essentially they will never get this money back.
I don't even have a Verizon account but I feel entitled to money by proxy for the suffering they have imposed that has filtered into the shared unconscious of humanity.
They had designed their phones such that there was a shortcut button to their web portal. Users without a data plan, taken to that portal, were charged for the data at the usual ridiculous out-of-plan rates. They could have the portal blocked but this just meant they were charged for the data used in retrieving the "this portal is blocked" page instead. So there's an interesting bit of background detail going on here. Maybe $2 per customer isn't much to the customer, but it's a tidy bit of extra revenue to Verizon.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
As opposed to the usual error free billing errors?
These customers would normally have been billed at the standard rate of $1.99 per megabyte for any data they chose to access from their phones.
Meant to say, "... standard obscene rate of ..." Thats oligopoly cartel price gouging at its finest.
I work in the telecom industry (not mobile phones). Over my career all the costs of landline long distance service have collapsed except for the cost of billing. Thus most of the "whatever cents per minute" cost is the cost of detailed billing, auditing, handling complaints. Finally the industry moved to "all you can eat" billing and everyone benefits.
I have no interest at all in owning a "smart phone" or whatever until per meg billing is abolished. I'm guessing out of the $2/meg they blow about $1 on customer support / complaints / legal / billing clerks time / software costs in support of the billing process itself and stash about $1 in pure profit.
If I'm going to pay money to get screwed, the scenario is not going to revolve around cell phone billing. F that whole industry and the shills and crooks that run it.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Thank God they don't run the Internet
Otherwise:
As others have noted, this is because of the practice of making the internet connection the most easy to select thing on the phone... despite the fact that extremely few people without smartphones use the internet on their phones. The two phones I had before I got an unlocked Nexus One were like this - you had to be careful because it's so easy to start the web browser, and there's no way to disable it. Nowadays, people also complain about the bloatware on Android phones, and now there's no easy way to get an unlocked Android phone.
Sure, these companies can get away with whatever they want because there's not really a cell phone free market in the US. Since they're already getting away with whatever they want, though, why do they purposefully make customers angry with this kind of stuff?
They act as if they don't actually make any money on selling phones and service, and their business model relies on tricking people into ridiculous charges. That's obviously not true, and it's simply insulting to the customers not only to nickel and dime them "legitimately", but also to trick them into paying ridiculous fees like this.
I *don't* think there should be more regulation, but I hope that the FCC continues to do things like this, to the point where it's no longer profitable for the cell carriers to act like such assholes. Maybe then people won't hate them so much, too.
This is totally conjecture, but I doubt Verizon would have been so willing to issue refunds without pressure.
Hmmmm.... while I'm not sure a proof of this conjecture can be produced via rigorous mathematical analysis, any mathematician with Verizon service probably disagrees.
It looks like this is unrelated, but a fun adventure for everyone.
I had a motorola flip phone I was using for tethering with verizon in 2007. I started getting bills for $600, $700, $800 for each month. I would call in and they would fix it. After about three months of this they told me they would not fix it any more. I had to get a firmware upgrade after which tethering stopped working. The device was worthless to me.
When I looked at the bill, it seems I was being charged per minute if I connected through the 1xrtt network. One rep actually told me "unlimited broadband" meant only unlimited when it was 3g and I was responsible to pay for when it connected at the slower speed. But there was no way to disable the 1xrtt fallback. It was just a convenient lie.
Then the collections department started calling me, saying "when do you think you will be paying this $1800 bill?" I asked them if they knew there were open tickets on the account to fix the broken charges. It basically came back to "but when do you think you will be paying this bill?"
I insisted on a device replacement and they got me a palm treo that worked ok but never as well as the flip phone for what I needed. They also reversed all the bad charges.
I quit verizon when the contract was done and I'm never going back.
'I've yet to meet an executive so far gone that he believes you can overcharge your customers and then repay the principal when you get caught. They like to be a lot more subtle than that.
It doesn't take much for executives (and people in general) to delude themselves into thinking they're doing the right thing. Executives have an ethical responsibility to do whatever is in the best interest of the stockholders. Therefore, if it means more money for stockholders for them to screw over customers with a slight possibility of getting a hand slap at some point in the future, then it is their moral responsibility to do so.
it looks like they are not addressing another illegal charge: I have a VOIP account that gives me a local phone number to make international calls. I used it from my cell and Verizon charged me $1.4 / min to call Brazil, when I was not using their system to make an international call. I was using their network to call a local domestic number in the US. When discussing the problem with Verizon, they told me that their system was charged because of my call and they have to re-pass that cost to me... interesting that my local telephone company does not have that charge and do not re-pass any INVENTED costs to me. The fact that they traced that number as being a bridge of a VOIP company, shows their absolute lack of ethics. be aware of this scam by Verizon Wireless...
Keep smiling http://JorgeVismara.net digitally captured emotions
I can say first hand, with confidence, the $5 refunds they are "giving" are a joke, and pale in comparison to the problem.
I have a large family, and *had* a large family plan to match. Every single month I had "mystery charges" that they couldn't explain. No, it's not just one month, it's month after month of spending hours on the phone sorting out why the !@#$ I'm getting charges without decent explanation.
Charges with names like "account restoral fee" (on a line that had been in continuous use for years) and "recovery surcharge". (what's being recovered? And why am I being charged for it!?) Charges that, when enquired about, nobody could justify. Charges so egregious that it sometimes doubled my total bill.
I wrote letters, I complained, I got stonewalled and nobody said much. I switched providers to Metro PCS, where the deal is simple: prepaid, unlimited calling, no contract. Wow, what a difference! I pay my bill, I get service. I don't, the service quits. The bill is always the same - no surprises, and they don't even have a shutoff/restoral fee so if I'm late paying the bill, I go online and pay, and within a few minutes, service is active.
Verizon, I was one of your best customers, but now, you've lost me for good. And I don't hesitate to talk about it.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.