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.'"

Comments

Re:An insult of a fine

[paganizer]

I've also got family share, with 5 lines; I just logged in to Verizon, and all my lines except 1, the one I have "unlimited data" on, have data charges. and those 4 other lines have data blocked.
1 of those lines is my mom's emergency phone, which has never had a text sent or received on it, at least not in the last 13 months; she doesn't do that sort of thing.
She also is being billed for 3 "premium" SMS messages this month...

Not counting the premium SMS thing, every month I get data charges on those blocked phones, even on phones that never made it out of the glovebox for long, long periods.

Their denial is sort of humorous.

Unfortunately for me, they have the only towers in my area.

my apologies if this is a dupe.