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Phone Customers Pay $2B Yearly In Bogus Fees
Hugh Pickens writes writes "CNN reports that a one-year study by the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee shows about $2 billion a year in 'mystery fees' show up on the landline phone bills of Americans. Known as cramming, the extra charges include:long distance service, subscriptions for Internet-related services, access to restricted websites, entertainment services with a 900 area code, collect calls, and club memberships. The Commerce Committee's report says phone companies receive a small fee — often just a dollar or two — for allowing charges from third-party vendors to appear on their bills but due to the large number of customers the charges eventually add up. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan told the panel people are unaware their phone numbers can be charged almost like a credit card and her investigations indicate customers are not even getting services in return. 'My office has yet to see a legitimate third-party charge on a bill,' says Madigan, who added most customers don't detect the charges on their bills. Senator Jay Rockefeller says Congress needs to pass legislation to protect customers from unauthorized third-party charges on their phone bills because the telephone industry has failed to prevent the practice. 'It's pretty obvious at this point that voluntary guidelines aren't solving this problem,' says Rockefeller. 'It's time for us to take a new look at this problem and find a way to solve it once and for all.'"
Does this seem lower than expected to anyone else, or is that just my own experience?
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
You call the phone company and demand they block all third party charges. They will hem and haw about how your life will suck without them. also with that block all fee phone number exchanges... yes they can do that as well. I got further and block all international calling as well. If I want to talk to Gunther in Germany, I'll use Skype or a calling card that is massively cheaper.
Honestly they need to default to all this crap being blocked and you have to call to enable it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Not only theft - wire fraud.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Every time I turn around it seems like there's a new way to game the easy systems in place for every-day-modern-life. The credit game has no security -- it relies of trusting lots and lots of strangers with "secret numbers" and bits of information that, when used, is "you." The phone bills have no security either. And all the while, we see fraud over and over and over again with almost no punishment or pursuit of the perpetrators while the enablers of all of this persist in using the system because the benefits them are apparently outweighing the problems or them... not the problems for the customers, but for them... they don't care about the customers.
US landlines aren't a simple billing exercise. First you need a local carrier, this is say $30/month for "free local calls". Then you need a national carriers (could be the same company), this requires a monthly subscription too. Then you need, yes, you guessed it, an international carrier. There's a default to pick up the national and internationals, but the rates can be very high. Miss dial and that unconnected call can cost $4. Once you navigate this setup you get banged with umpteen levels of taxes and fees, which never seem to be the same month to month.
Things may have improved over the last few years, we gave up with land lines and use vonage's $25/month service (uses internet for connections but acts as as real phone system). This settled our national and international costs (free) for a while, but then the patent mess started and the FCC decided to stick its oar in. We now pay about $34/month for the $25/month service thanks to taxes and fees. Which is a hell of a lot better than regular phone companies (for us).
Call your phone company and ask them to separate the extra charges from your phone bill. That way, the (perhaps) evil company will have to bill you independently of your phone bill. Often, they won't bother because they now know that you're the kind of person that doesn't mindlessly pay some mystery charge on your phone bill. I did this when I received a huge and clearly exploitative charge for receiving a collect call. This was several months ago and I have yet to hear back from the company that now has to send me a bill independently of the phone company.
FTFA:
"When third-party vendors are contacted they claim the charges were authorized by customers and they often say they have audio recordings of the customer giving the OK, Madigan said...However, when her office obtained audio recordings, the voices turned out not to belong to the consumers who were billed, she said. "
"Eppley said she called the third-party company and was told Eppley's company had OK'd the charges and there was an audio recording to back that up. Eppley asked to hear it but the company never provided the audio recording."
sounds like straight out fraud. When you're only stealing $5, but do it a million times, it's easy to avoid legal ramifications as people see you as a nuisance, but not worth legal hassle.
Most people don't look at their bills at all. Why? Paperless billing. My bank, credit card company, utility company, mobile, internet, TV and phone company all want me to switch to paperless billing. A few credit cards actually gave you a credit for going paperless. I know from personal experience that when I get the email notice of a new statement, I peek at the dollar value. if it looks about right I rarely click through to the actual statement. I guarantee you a lot of people don't even go this far.
1) This whole article is in fact about the fact that it's a fraud. That's what makes them "mysterious" and "illegitimate": they're bills for services that were never provided.
2) A typical US phone bill that does not have any of these charges on it (so just a normal bill) has a dozen or more line items with names designed to be as obscure as possible. Not only that, but in many cases these change from month to month (both the total bill amount and the exact itemization). As a result, it's actually easy to miss a $1 charge that shouldn't be there unless you're _very_ carefully reading the bill every month. Which most people don't.
3) For reasons that are beyond me, many people have their phone bills set up to auto-pay (basically have the phone company just withdraw the money from the user's bank account). So in that case there is no cheque being written. The payment just happens; you get sent a bill (or an e-mail that you can look at the bill online, if the phone company's incessant attempts to get you to go paperless succeeded).
So the deck is stacked against people noticing the problem. If they _do_ notice it, they have to decide whether they want to spend several hours on the phone trying to get rid of the charge or just pay it and move on. I bet in many cases people do the latter.
But I suppose Comcast is, for all practical purposes, a telco too.
I buy broadband only from Comcast, and at a discount too from a reseller.
One month my bill doubled -- they started charging me for CableTV. Call them up, ask them why CableTV is on the bill. Wait for them to look up my records, then the lie that "someone at your address authorized the add on." I tell them "nope, I'm the only one at this address with the authority to do that, and I did not, so take it off, I'm not using it, I'm not paying for it." Next lie was "oh, we'll send someone out, you'll have to be at home for the service call." My response: "How did it get added without an installer coming out? You didn't need someone here to add it, you don't need anyone here to delete it."
My wife and kids are finally trained too. Verizon sales droid walking the neighborhood rings the doorbell when I'm not home, tries to sell my wife or kids, I forget who, on FIOS. Nope, they told the rep, you block port 80. The sales droid had no idea what that meant.
In my case, a $12.95 monthly charge just showed up on my phone bill (land line). There are so many odd items on the bill, it's hard to notice another one.
That amount is more than I pay for my two business fixed lines. Yes that's together. So that's a pretty big sum for a phone bill to appear.
Secondly, "so many odd charges"... you go through the bill once, and tick what you don't know what it is. And make a call to the phone company for explanation. That's what I do with my credit card bill. It's not that hard, it just requires you to care about your money. If you let such sums just stand, sorry to say, but you obviously don't care enough.
Even with itemized paper bills, many people don't look at what they are being billed for. Of course, if you don't look at the itemized portion of the bill, don't complain when mystery charges turn up. Even without anyone doing anything evil, incorrect charges will occasionally turn up because someone made a data entry error.
I understand why you do what you do. I know approximately what each of my bills should be and if it is close to that I just glance over the itemized portion to make sure there isn't some new category of charge. I had one recurring charge on a cell phone bill get by for two or three months because it was less than two dollars because of that. Then my wife sent an unusual amount of text messages one month and my bill was high, so I looked at the details. The bill was high for legitmate reasons, but I caught the invalid charge (now I look at my cell phone bill a little closer each month).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
It is not theft because large corporations profit from it. At least that is the best explanation I can derive from observing the US justice system.
Got family that works for a big phone company. Not a fan of the company mind you. Just wanted to give a shot at telling you what they told me about this whole mess.
Under the telecom act of 1996, the big phone companies at least, ATT, the 2 others, they're kinda between a rock and a hard place. The law requires that if some of these little piddly shit regional guys give them a signed LOA saying the customer wants a service, the phone company is REQUIRED BY LAW to push the billing through. Further, they are FORBIDDEN BY LAW to call and ask you if that's really your signature and if you really want this to go through.
Now they are required to do basic due diligence on the companies doing this. They have to make sure they're at least in appearance on the up and up. And if they get crap tons of people complaining about it they can eventually tell said company to take a hike, but it isn't instantaneous.
Anyways, the point is this isn't... entirely the big telecoms fucking you over. It's some shitty laws they helped write forcing them into a stupid position. So... don't just sit around and say we need to boycott them or some shit, push for the law to be changed.
I blame direct withdraw for people not noticing it. Verizon tagged an addition $6 on my first bill for not allowing them to take money directly from my account. It is in the fine print. Needless to say I told them to go fuck themselves and nix'd the account. Every bill I pay gets looked at while I write the check so I notice everything and have a solid paper trial of my own. Unfortunately, more corporations are pushing this. IMHO so they are protected from the pissed off customer that refuses to pay the extra month and mysterious extra charges on the last bill after telling them to fuck off.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
No, it's not theft because the last two times (2005 and 2010) legislation to stop it came up, key Republicans (like Boehner) were paid off by the phone companies to keep it from coming to the floor.
Now, if it had been PELOSI who quashed the bills during the brief time the Democrats held the Congress, then the Republicans would be screaming bloody murder. But they'd rather this sit quietly under the rug and be forgotten about, because it's their "rape the consumer" agenda running as usual.
On top of paperless billing is "automatic payments" for your "convenience" (it's really for their convenience). So, mystery charges are added to a bill, you get an email with your itemized bill telling you "thank you for your payment" and good luck trying to get the company to refund that money.
Before commenting on the Bible, please read it first
I think I just figured out the solution to America's budget problem! We'll just cram $14 trillion onto next month's phone bill!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I have had some experience with this, and what happens is there will be a phone call made to the customer, may times a business, (the mark, as it were) and they will ask something like "do you not want your phone number listing to not be not removed from the universal listing service?" or some such bogus question, the person says something either yes or no.
The theiving company then makes a record that the mark company has agreed to have the service, since they actually made contact with them, then they do whatever procedure is needed to add the 3rd party charges to the bill.
There is no law that says 3rd party charges are illegal as long as the "customer" actually "agrees" to the charge. Sometimes there are even recordings of the conversation. A fast talking call center employee usually gets a low paid phone answerer at the company, and they don't know about the scams, don't know to say no to anything. Sometimes even saying "no" really means "yes, start charging me" because of how they word the question.
Many times the people paying the bill aren't the owner, and they only look at the final amount.
It is possible to remove the charges by calling the 3rd party company and saying the person who they talked to didn't have authority to make the agreement, and sometimes you can even get a refund of much of the money back to the start of the charges being on the bill.
The key thing to realize is that it IS legal, it is 99.99999% bogus, everyone knows it (except most of the customers, apparently) and they let it continue. I heard that a while back there was a large amount of fines laid out on these 3rd party companies, sort of a gesture by the powers that be. Yet it continues.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
No. The customers are doing squat. These scammers just go through the phonebook at and add monthly fees to peoples bills. My parents buisness had fight with AT&T for 3 months because of these scams. They would get a fee taken off and the scammers would just add it back on. They had to watch there bill each month and call AT&T every month to get the fees dropped.
Besides responding to an obvious troll, I'd like to point out that I have a VoIP service (ATT U-Verse), and they do the exact same thing, adding about 10 stupid misc. "government" fees and "equipment surcharges" to the bill. It's just as incomprehensible and steeped in nonsense as the old land-line bills used to be, and the assholes manage to "bill creep" me up about $3-5 more and more every damn month, just like the old land-line. Progress? You tell me...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Incorrect... If it had been Pelosi, she would be paid off by the phone companies, or otherwise given an offer she can't refuse. It is pointless to vilify an individual person or party. The authority itself is corrupt
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Those are "required" by the regulators though... Crooked, but that's how "adjustments" work when they go thru big bureaucracy.
Some of them are, but others are just things that the telecom companies add themselves, but call them something that sounds like it's a government-mandated fee. I've seen this from Sprint and Verizon both in the past. If you call and ask about them, they will usually tell you that it's a mandatory fee. I had to get escalated a couple of times to some higher level manager before I was able to find out that they weren't actually mandated by the government, but were, in fact, just additional charges added by the company.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Wrong. These are fraudulent charges and the phone companies - land and cellular - basically collude. I was slammed by "Celebrity Squares" and started getting text messages sent to my phone that were stupid quiz questions about celebrities. I thought it was just junk text messages and would delete them.
I finally got tired of it and looked them up online to find how to stop the annoyance. That's when a few of the Google hits were about fraudulent charges. I immediately checked my bill and sure enough - buried in a line that I had to expand twice were the charges from Celebrity Squares.
I called Celebrity Squares and they said I had specifically requested the "service". I have a static IP address and they gave me a date, time, and my IP address to say that I had signed up and I had not. My logs don't go back that far or I would have seen what website I gave my call phone number to because they were either corrupt or compromised. Regardless, this was a fraudulent charge and had been happening for a while.
I demanded all money back but they only refunded $30. I called my cell phone company, told them my story, complained about the fraudulent charges, and they also refunded $30. $160 had been taken from my account by Celebrity Squares.
I was fed up so contacted my Senator who took up the case and contacted the cell phone company about the charges, hiding the charges on my bill (I sent them screen grabs since I do online paperless billing), and allowing Celebrity Squares (and others) to add charges to people's bills without the customer's permission. The cell company refunded all of the money taken by Celebrity Squares and was going to back bill them for the amount.
My case was one of the ones presented as evidence during the Senate hearings this week. Companies like Celebrity Squares are dirty and the cell phone companies are more than happy to let them add charges because they get a cut. They make millions off of these scams. I can only guess how much money Celebrity Squares and others make.
If you get monthly stupid celebrity quiz questions, they got you too. Go check your bill and see how much you are being charged and you can see how much money you have had stolen.
This is a huge problem.
As an aside, the cell companies can lock out those kinds of charges but you have to opt out. By default you are opted in and third party companies can add charges to anyone's bill that hasn't said specifically to block them. One of the points I made to my Senator was that that needed to change. People should be opted out by default and have to choose to allow such charges.
Please post a reply if you got slammed by Celebrity Squares. And tell your Senators. Or if you got slammed by anyone. The more who come forward, the better chance of getting legislation passed that blocks these activities and if your evidence is good enough, we might be able to get prosecution for companies like Celebrity Squares.
Can you get anymore scummy than them?
ja, ja
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...until some event(end of quarter? system upgrade? full moon?) defaults you back to the profitable mode. Blatant and annoying, yes. I went around with Verizon from '02, to '07(mostly $5 'web access fee', I never texted or surfed via phone and still don't to this day). I have been off contract since '07 and haven't had a single over charge since. Hell, they didn't even charge me a late fee when I was over 10 days late a couple months back.I use bare minimum voice($45) and for my mobile data I use my N800 + hotspots. Imagine how many thousands of dollars of mine they could have had over the last 8 years if they didn't fuck with me out of the gate...
TL;DR: stop giving them your money!
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
You do realize that we're talking about a anyone being able to provide a telco a phone number and say $10 please without the number's owner's permission nor awareness. You are right though, it's not theft, it's wire fraud.