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Verizon To Pay $25M For Years of 'Mystery Fees'
Ponca City writes "The Washington Post reports that the FCC has reached a record $25 million settlement with Verizon Wireless over the company's wrongly charging subscribers 'mystery' Internet fees over the past several years — the largest settlement in FCC history. With the action, Verizon Wireless's total costs associated with false data fees reached $77.8 million, one of the largest payouts for false business practices in the communications services industry. 'People shouldn't find mystery fees when they open their phone bills — and they certainly shouldn't have to pay for services they didn't want and didn't use,' says FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. 'In these rough economic times, every $1.99 counts.' Verizon Wireless said in a news release that its overcharges were inadvertent. 'We accept responsibility for those errors, and apologize to our customers who received accidental data charges on their bills.'"
My brother-in-law was on Verizon for years. Each of his phones had a button which connected to the Verizon store where you would go to buy games or ring tones or whatever. My T-Mobile phones always had t-zones buttons; same thing, no big deal. Except for on Verizon, if you didn't subscribe to a data plan, every time you pushed that button, whether intentional or not, your phone initiated a data connection to Verizon and you were hit with the $1.99 fee. I know this because every month he would call Verizon and dispute the charge and they would give him the run around for a while before apologizing and crediting his account for the charges. Because he was under contract, this continued for 2 years. I think Verizon should pay him for the many hours of his life he spent arguing on the phone with their customer service reps trying to get these charges reversed.
On an related note, he is now on T-Mobile (free mobile to mobile calling, woot!)
That's the reality of corporate personhood in a nutshell.
All of the advantages (rights, freedoms, profits)
with none of the disadvantages (jail, death, taxes)
(And don't say they pay taxes. The majority of corporations in the U.S. pay no taxes AT ALL).
If corporations are bad actors in a country, they ought to be have their charter revoked with no enumeration to stockholders. If CEOs are so responsible for a company (as they insist every time the subject of CEO pay packages come up) then they go to jail when the company breaks the law.
Back when I was 17~19, I was on my dad's family plan. We got a mystery $14.99/month VPAK that appeared on multiple phones multiple times. None of us used the multimedia features of the phone, and I even went online and parental-control-banned all multimedia features from my own phone, but the charge still kept coming back. Of course, every time we complained they revoked the charge, but we had to scan our bill every month to make sure we didn't have the bogus charges.
Finally, after the charge came back at least 6 or 7 times, my dad got fed up and told Verizon that if the charge appears there one more time, he's canceling the whole family plan, and the company that he is an executive at will switch to Sprint (the company has a couple thousand verizon phones). The charge never re-appeared.
I am completely convinced that these charges are intentional, and I bet they target people who have kids and family plans, as they're more likely to blame their kids for downloading something than complain that Verizon was giving them bogus charges.