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Verizon Offers Refunds For Fraudulent SMS Messages

Posted by samzenpus on from the take-a-couple-bucks dept.

itwbennett writes "Verizon has filed a lawsuit against a group of people and related companies that it alleges duped people into signing up and getting charged for premium short message services. Because some of the short message programs the defendants set up complied with Verizon's rules, Verizon says it is unable to identify which customers didn't know about the charges for the services. As a result it has set up a Web page where customers can file a claim form and get reimbursed if they were wrongly charged for the services."

1 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Whose going to sue Verizon? by GooberToo · · Score: 3, Informative

    ow you buy a multi-line plan....say a family plan consisting of 5 lines.

    Last I looked, the family plan doesn't require five phones. A family plan was simply shared minutes with two or more phones. The problem is, its actually more expensive until you get five phones on your plan. Verizon's family plan actually makes no sense. Traditionally, shared minutes was a means of cheaper service. But with Verizon, you actually pay a premium for cheaper service until you have reached five lines and then its only slightly discounted.

    If you are a Verizon customer and on a family plan and do not have five phones on the account, very, very, very likely you can save money by moving away from the family plan and converting to individual plans without shared minutes.

    Texting is so much less data being sent in small packets while voice requires so much more infrastructure

    Its even more insulting than that. Text data is actually carried by the control channel which every phone must have to register on the network. All they did was increase the packet size of the control channel messages. That's why there is a text message size limit. The RF portion of transport is really what costs them and their extra cost for carrying SMS is literally, almost zero. On a busy tower, they can fit 9 SMS messages into a single ethernet frame which means. SMS is the most expensive data for consumers and the cheapest for carriers. The fact SMS isn't a completely free service is mind numbing.