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Overbilled Customer Sues Time Warner Cable For False Advertising
An anonymous reader writes According to a lawsuit filed Friday in a New York court, when Jeremy Zielinski signed up for Time Warner Internet service after seeing an ad that it was $34.99 a month, he didn't expect his first bill to be more than $94. He didn't expect he'd have to fight for weeks to resolve it. And he didn't expect that, Time Warner's next step would be to sell him faster speeds, not bother to tell him his modem couldn't handle them, send him a bill anyway, then demand that he drive to the local office at his own expense to get a compatible modem. So he's taking the cable giant to court, accusing it of false advertising and deceptive business practices. While a lone individual fighting in court against the second largest cable company in the world certainly doesn't have the odds in his favor, this could get interesting. According to the complaint, he opted out of TWC's binding arbitration clause a few days after he opened his account, so he might have a shot of keeping this issue in real court. Stay tuned for more.
Just don't make a class action out of it unless you are willing to settle for a coupon worth less than your cost to cash it in.
It's things like this that make someone who is conservative and pretty much Pro-Business agree with Obama that these people need to be declared Public Utilities and suffer all the usual regulations.
Right now, Cable companies are gaming the system. They claim to be competitive businesses and that they should not be regulated like a utility, yet they enjoy the protections from competition typically enjoyed by Utilities.
My neighborhood has Time Warner and AT&T DSL. AT&T was only able to provide internet because they had the phone lines. As it stands now Verizon, Google, or anyone else who wants to provide broadband, can't because of the franchise agreements. Time Warner can fuck you in the ass and all you can do is beg for lube because no other company is going to think, "hey, we can do a better job at a lower price" and then provide service because the Government (local) won't allow it.
So Two Options...Declare all exclusivity/franchise agreements null and void and allow anyone with the capital to lay/string lines and provide service, or declare these fuckers utilities and MANDATE levels of service or tell them to GTFO and let someone else provide it.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Comcast offered a $50 cash card if we signed up for internet service with them. We signed up in May, and the card never came. We called and they denied that they ever offered the card. A few more calls later, they agreed that they offered it and said they would send it. It never came. Last month, five months, a final call was made and the card arrived.
Clearly they have a strategy of screwing customers, either through intentional scripting or extreme negligence.
The *only* reason to offer some sort of price promotion later instead of just giving you the discount up front and making you sign a contract (even for three months of service) is so that they can roll the dice on customers signing up after being enticed by the promotion, and then not claiming the promotion. Rebates work the same way. Why is it that we can pass a thousand consumer protection laws about credit card interest rates and privacy disclosures, but can't just ban the blatant rip-off of rebate promotions?
I agree. The big ISPs are claiming that they can police themselves and don't need government regulation. Meanwhile, they are abusing their monopoly/duopoly positions to grab as much money as they can from consumers. About the only entity large enough to scare them back into some semblance of sanity *IS* the government. It's not an ideal solution, but the ISPs only have themselves to blame for being greedy and sleazy.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Never attribute to malice what could be explained by stupidity. Eg they could unintentionally be profitting millions and they have no clue why because they never audit the department managing the cash card offers.
They know not to ask questions to which they do not want to know the answers.
For starters he filled his complaint with a bunch of throwaway lines that seem aimed at impressing the /. crowd but which are not relevant to his case and run the risk of annoying the Judge:
"Browsing through the TWC website, Plaintiff encountered an advertisement for a "Standard" Internet access line. While the rest of the modern world, and even otherwise-third world countries, enjoy substantially faster and better-value Internet access lines" <--- Not relevant and inflammatory
"After logging in, Plaintiff was able to view an online statement for his account. Plaintiff expected as a result of the advertising that his bill would be $34.99, plus perhaps some small amount in taxes. To his shock, however, the bill was nearly three times that amount – it was $94.45. Although the Internet service was advertised at $34.99 per month, Plaintiff was billed $39.99 for it. There was an unexplained "Internet modem lease" fee of $5.99 added to the bill, and an "Internet, Install service" fee of $47.99 added as well. The bill also included charges for services not yet rendered." <--- Month ahead billing is a standard practice in many industries, ranging from real estate (rent is due on the 1st, not the 31st) to telecommunications. This claim will fail.
He did have valid claims about the unadvertised install fee and price difference of $5/mo but by his own admission TWC waived the former fee while putting him on a $20/mo plan. He therefore he has no cause of action on either of these complaints. They will be disposed of with a simple motion to dismiss by the defendant, without ever being litigated. His complaint about not receiving promised speeds will fail, since the DOCSIS 2 modem they provided him with is theoretically capable of delivering the 20/2 speed he subscribed to; also, by his own admission he signed up for an "up to" service. The only complaint that may succeed is related to TWC's advertised list of "approved" modems, though I doubt very much a State Court is going to wade into such technical matters.
Disclaimer: I have no lost love for TWC and certainly have shared his aggravation when I've had the misfortune of dealing with them. In this case though? His own complaint tells me they made a good faith effort to resolve these issues. It was certainly aggravating for him but aggravation is not a cause of action in our legal system. TWC could win the majority of these points without even filing a response, based solely off what the plaintiff writes in his complaint.
His case is so thin that TWC could probably win a motion for court costs; I highly doubt they'll do that, the negative press would outweigh anything they'd gain, but they could if they were so inclined. This will end with TWC offering a settlement and writing it off as a public relations expense. If he refuses the settlement he'll look that much worse in the eyes of the Judge; Judges hate litigants who reject reasonable settlements.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I think technically it's fraud, isn't it?
They didn't steal from you, they charged you for something they weren't giving you.
Of course, getting that sorted out is damned near impossible, and even if you did get them in court they could plead incompetence.
And, of course, their 'license' for their service probably says that you agree to this.
It really is time to take some of the power out of the hands of the corporations here.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The person who initiates a class action usually gets a pretty good payout, too.
Obviously the Republitards are going to side with big cable
Must you make this partisan? Comcast bought *everybody* off. http://www.nationalreview.com/...
I'll go ahead and attribute it to incompetence rather than malice,
If the bottom line of the company on average benefits from the incompetence then I attribute it to malice.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The problem is that the stupidity explanation has stretched credulity to the breaking point. All those 'errors' across all those departments and they somehow manage to (practically) never err in the customer's favor. The odds of that are so long that even the most generously trusting person would have to suspect there was some sort of systematic effort to make things happen that way.
Rebates have other purposes.
One differentiation from a normal plain price cut is info. In this case, you're a Comcast customer and they have said info, but in the general buying-from-a-store sense its a good source of buyer info. if i bought, say, a ShopVac and I had a mail-in rebate, then ShopVac has the name and mailing address of a ShopVac customer. They're now free to use that information in certain ways, such as junk mail, sending me mail for add-ons, etc.
Second is price discrimination. If somebody wants to give me 200 for this, I don't want to get in his way. If someone will only pay 150, well, I have a 50 rebate card he can send in for. There's some effort in the rebate card and maybe the guy who paid 200 loses the receipt or just doesn't want to bother with mailing it in. That's an extra 50 for the seller, called producer surplus.
Back when Joel Spolsky wrote more, he had an excellent primer on pricing. It's written from a producer point of view, but it's a a good read for consumers as well. If you know about producer surplus, you know where you can start negotiating on prices as a buyer.