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AT&T To Repay $80 Million In Shady Phone Bill Charges
First time accepted submitter dibdublin writes The Federal Trade Commission announced today that AT&T will pay $105 million for hiding extra charges in cellphone bills. The best part of the news? $80 million of it will go back into the pockets of people bilked by AT&T. The FTC announcement reads in part: "As part of a $105 million settlement with federal and state law enforcement officials, AT&T Mobility LLC will pay $80 million to the Federal Trade Commission to provide refunds to consumers the company unlawfully billed for unauthorized third-party charges, a practice known as mobile cramming. The refunds are part of a multi-agency settlement that also includes $20 million in penalties and fees paid to 50 states and the District of Columbia, as well as a $5 million penalty to the Federal Communications Commission."
This will go nicely with the check I got from the Apple suit.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Couldn't happen to a better company.
Is there a more sleazy, incompetent corporate entity on the face of this planet?
Rhetorical question of course. Anyone who's done business with them knows the answer.
AT&T to Pay $105 Million Over Unlawful Billing
...customers who were billed “hundreds of millions of dollars" in unauthorized charges...
I guess AT&T gets to keep the extra couple hundred million.
But at some point, an attorney general is going to have to have to call a spade and spade and actually file criminal charges against actual officials for the pattern that keeps emerging at the telecoms and cable companies. Notoriety for agreeing to pay $X for Y and then finding $X steadily increasing or Y getting padded is not an oversight. It's a pattern of fraud. People need to go to prison for that. The shareholders will thank the states after a few years if the states clean house in these companies and thus hopefully put an end to that rotten culture. It's a liability.
By the time the bureaucrats finish, less than $1 will be available to split amongst all us wronged consumers.
To submit your claim, but they'll require you to have a copy of the bills and proof of payment (e.g. copies of cleared checks, bank statements). Only 1 out of 10 victims will have the necessary paperwork. All remaining money will sit pretty in ATT's bank account.
"In its complaint against AT&T, the FTC alleges that AT&T billed its customers for hundreds of millions of dollars in charges originated by other companies, usually in amounts of $9.99 per month, for subscriptions for ringtones and text messages containing love tips, horoscopes, and âoefun facts.â In its complaint, the FTC alleges that AT&T kept at least 35 percent of the charges it imposed on its customers"
at least they were paying for a valuable service!
They have to give back what they stole. In a just world, this would simply be the normal course of events. Besides, 25 million in penalties for getting caught stealing 80 million? That's at least an order of magnitude short of a just penalty for an entity that cannot go to jail.
My bill showed my data and voice plans each as $20 more than the agreed-upon (in writing) rates selected back in January of this year. I had to argue on the phone for about half an hour, but they finally agreed to refund the money. I had to stay on the line while the CS rep filed a separate refund form for not only each month this happened, but for each of the charges. Since it was 9 months of wrongful billing it took an hour for her to refund me the 18 charges -- $360. In less than a year. I've been telling everyone I know who uses AT&T to double-check their bills because of this. Something similar happened to me with an insurance company which over-billed me by $600; by the time I got the money back it was $850 including the interest.
Send them to fed for couple months at least. The fine is not even a slap on the wrist. What's the point?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
That's why these companies just keep on doing this.
to renew your flagging zeal to cooperate with the NSA.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
I feel like the FCC is trying to butter us up (or perhaps lube our rear ends) for something unpleasant they plan to do.
Define incompetent for me, please. If you mean that the board and executive staff are more concerned their own financial wealth than anything else, then the following list should scratch the tip of the iceberg:
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Barclays Capital, General Dynamics, General Electric, Carlisle Group, Microsoft, Berkshire Hathaway, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, any 'Private Capital' company you'd care to mention, all the Sovereign Capital investment funds from the Mideast, every Insurance company, Disney, Time Warner, Big Coal, Big Pharma, the American Beef Council, ALEC, Koch Industries, all of the Canadian Mining concerns, Big OIL, the Republican National Committee, the Democratic National Committee, the Federal Reserve Cartel... and the beat goes on, and on and on...
Now that the Chinese have mastered the western rules of engagement, it's high time we learn Mandarin so as to be able to round out the list with the corporations that succeeded in creating the world's largest real estate bubble in history as well as the those that are filling the cesspools of Shanghai, Beijing, etc.. And don't forget the Russian Oligarchs who rule permafrost.
(It's no wonder the Captcha code to let me post this was "paranoia".)
I bet everyone gets a 2 month subscription to some junk AT&T service like being able to track your family's phones through their proprietary app.
When it happened to me and I complained, the ATT CSR told me that it was Congress's fault; they specifically wrote this feature into Telecom law to encourage business.
AT&T keeps adding "insurance" charges to our bill, and make up silly excuses for adding it, usually involving some twisted "misunderstanding" of our requests. Do their sales people go to Bogus Alibi School?
Me: "Achoo!"
AT&T Service Dweeb: "Achoo is Swahili for 'I want insurance'. Done, Bye [phone click]"
Table-ized A.I.
When I worked for AT&T, I totally saw this coming because the policy was not to credit SMS stuff, because the users willfully subscribed to to these things.
And it is true, the customers who subscribe to these things are idiots, often falling for the "enter your phone number, win an iPad*" scams.
*The rules would actually say subscribing to a premium service that would rebill, actual chances of winning were infinitely small. I was one of the few reps who discovered you could text STOP to these, and that was my personal policy to tell them to do that and then contact who they were being billed by.
This stuff all started when customers started getting "3G" phones when the GSM network came online. Prior to the 3G network, customers on the 2G network would also fall for these scams, but generally there was confusion about why these charges weren't included in "unlimited text" packages.
And that's basically where AT&T ****ed up.
I did credit some people back for the charges as long as their excuse wasn't "my kid did it", because that's the worst excuse in the book. As long as there was less than 10$ in charges I'd credit it back and tell them to text STOP, and then note the account this advice was given, no further credit should be given.
Company policy then, and even when I left was "no credit for premium SMS, whatsoever", and most reps didn't even know how to credit it back, it involved an obscure JAVA applet, and sometimes it just didn't work for all mobile numbers.
The big payout cums to 4 cents per person in the U.S.
Here's a simple formula that AT&T (and I'm sure every other corporation) uses some variant of...
IF Estimated Profit - Penalty for getting Caught * Chance of getting Caught > 0 THEN Do it.
IE 80M - 105M * X% > 0?
I seem to remember the profits being a _lot_ more that a measly $105 billion.
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