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FCC Plans To Stop Cell Phone Bill Mystery Fees
GovTechGuy writes "FCC chairman Julius Genachowski said Monday that his agency is going to make it harder for mobile carriers to hit customers with mystery fees on their monthly bills. The practice, known as 'cramming,' typically involves charging customers between $1.99 and $19.99 per month for services they either didn't use or didn't request. The FCC announced fines totaling nearly $12 million against four carriers for cramming last week."
Let's see. $12 million in fines, total, eh? Verizon Wireless at the end of 2009 had around 90 million subscribers. Cram a $0.99 charge onto each, take into account the fines, and...yes, profit!
A hero is someone who knows when to run away. I am a hero. -Trent the Uncatchable
The fines will mean nothing if the carriers make more money than what the fines cost. They need to put some people in jail and this shit would stop.
Main Street Telephone for $4,200,000
VoiceNet Telephone, LLC for $3,000,000
Cheap2Dial Telephone, LLC for $3,000,000
Norristown Telephone, LLC for $1,500,000
Looks like either the majors are not engaging in this practice or too large of Goliaths for the FTC to consider throwing stones at.
From TFA:
BS. Sheer nonsense. The problem is not that the bills are hard to "understand". The problem is the cramming in the first place. Remove the ability for any arbitrary fly-by-night op to place charges on anyone's bill, if they know their phone number, and the problem will mysteriously disappear.
Cramming takes advantage of social engineering. "Wanna a HOT NEW LADY GAGA ringtone!!!! Just type in your phone number on our web site. (tiny font: $9.99 per month charge applies)".
And that's how a "simple-minded" acquaintenance of mine ended up with $40 bucks worth of charges on her bill, some years ago.
Get rid of the ability for anyone to cram charges, without a written notice by YOU, to YOUR cellphone carrier, and there's no more cramming. Of course, the cell-phone carriers will fight tooth and nail. I'm sure they make a nice profit skimming off their share of all the crammed charges.
When I worked for ATT Wireless, a lot of "cramming" was a result of three things
a. Management demanding unreasonable PCR (Proactive Contract Renewal) or Giving Incentives for PCR
b. CSR's who were not trained, or cut corners in provisioning services
c. Default settings in the billing system.
Now I won't fault ATT Wireless for wanting to make money, but here's a few examples.
-The 1.75 Regulatory Programs Fee, is a tickbox in AXYS (the TDMA billing system) but not Siebel (the 3G billing system), it's automatically added every time you change the service plan.
-Changing the plan from a X-PLANNAME to PLANNAME was a one-way process, If the representative made a mistake (or the customer changed their mind, or hung up/dropped before confirming the details) then it was impossible to undo. So promotions and features that don't exist in the new plan, and only the older version of the plan can't be put back. The Mass Data Entry system would remove incompatible promos. (MDE was responsible for 90% of cramming and billing errors.)
- Management, Supervisors and Team Leads had more leeway to correct mistakes under ATT Wireless, but Cingular had a 50% one time rule. So you couldn't correct mistakes, no matter how legitimate they were.
- Management often embarrassed CSR's by making them call the customer and apologize for their mistake, this results in CSR's avoiding punishment by cutting corners by trying to escalate "hard" calls so they won't be held responsible for mistakes.
- "One call resolution" was a performance metric along with call handle time. Some representatives cheat this metric by sticking to a script which could only be described as "say no to everything and blame the customer."
Overall the experience of working for a mobile carrier is disheartening, because people often call in with legitimate issues, but the directive from management is "get them off the phone ASAP", so you're not allowed to solve the problem properly, only quickly.
The worst cramming comes from text messaging scams. You know the "send a message to (5 digit number) to win an ipod", those are all scams, and the wireless carrier is in on it. Each text message costs like 1.99 or something, and they cause subscriptions (repeated charges,) but they target children. The parent then calls in and demands to know what these charges are and claims they never did any. The solution was to disable the e-wallet on the account. However management failed representatives quality score if they proactively disabled the ewallet. Which BTW was a difficult thing to do, as disabling the ewallet involved one of 13 logins that were not used very often.
The current version of this is now flipped. To enter to win the ipods, you put your phone number into a web form on the website, which does exactly the same as above. In fact it makes it much easier to cram charges because the CSR's at the carrier can't figure out where they subscribed. As far as the phone carrier is concerned, you consented to the charge (that is why there are mile long TOS on those sites.) Since it comes out of the phone carriers pocket, you can't dispute the charges.
Personally I reversed the charges with impunity because I knew those sites were scams, but took it on the nose on Quality for doing so.