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T-Mobile To Pay $90M For Unauthorized Charges On Customers' Bills
itwbennett writes T-Mobile US will pay at least $90 million to settle a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) suit that alleged it looked the other way while third parties charged T-Mobile subscribers for services they didn't want. The settlement is the second largest ever for so-called 'cramming,' following one that the FCC reached with AT&T in October. It came just two days after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued Sprint for the same practice.
IF they are paying fine to doing the bad deed... What about paying back all the customers that they took money from?
I started getting text messages on some celebrity quiz game but was just deleting them until I finally got tired of them. I looked the company up online and saw where people were complaining about getting slammed and charges showing up. I checked my bill and sure enough - there were the charges. I hadn't noticed them because they were down a couple of extra layers under something like "miscellaneous charges". I called T-Mobile to stop it and get the charges refunded but they had me contact the charging company to dispute and the charging company would only refund a couple of months. This had been going on for about 5 months. I called T-Mobile and insisted on total refunds and just got a runaround. I called my Senator and told his staff about it. They intervened and T-Mobile contacted me and gave me a full refund. The Senator's staff contacted me again and asked if I minded if my case data was used in their investigation and I told them not at all. Looks like it has all finally bore fruit.
The company - I would have to check my files for the name - said I had visited some web site and signed up for their celibrity quiz game. I had a static IP address at the time and sure as shit, they had it. I had apparently visited a site that was simply harvesting IP addresses, or somehow they associated my IP with my name. I would never sign up for some celebrity quiz. It was a simple slam.
Glad they all got nailed!
Remember when the Republicans in Congress fought against the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? This is why.
The CFPB was actually proposed by Elizabeth Warren, then still at Harvard. She was Obama's first choice for its Director, but her appointment was blocked.
T-Mobile's big mama, the Deutsche Telekom AG (DTAG) has been doing .. they got smarter about it and let third parties do the the fantasy
this for years in Germany. First they themselves invented charges to put
on people's bills until there was enough backlash and they got fined for it.
Then
billing.
I am so not surprised to see T-Mobile USA do the same thing. They must
figure what works in Germany works just as well in the USA.
What they the "Telekoms" need for them to stop this pattern of ripping people off (on top of
their expensive service that is), is a couple of devastating, ear-ringing and numbing slaps
in the face. The kind where they will debate whether or not to shutdown their USA operations.
Not the light slaps on the wrist they got from the German courts. German big business obviously
owns their home courts.
Why not fine them as well for illegal charging people when they didnt consent??
I called my Senator and told his staff about it. They intervened and T-Mobile contacted me and gave me a full refund. The Senator's staff contacted me again and asked if I minded if my case data was used in their investigation and I told them not at all. Looks like it has all finally bore fruit.
I salute you sir for your efforts. May I kindly ask who your Senator was at the time?
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
A penalty that stands a chance of getting the offender's attention, rather than one that's considered simply a cost of doing business. The fine should have been higher though - perhaps an additional $90M as purely punitive damages. Companies need to learn that wilfully screwing over their customers really, really hurts their bottom line. Also, an award approaching a fifth of a billion would likely piss off enough shareholders that several heads would roll.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
And I haven't received my $250 yet. It's been a year. Good luck.
If they made 900 million and we fine 1/10, it's not much of a disincentive.
Did T-mobile make more than 90 million off these practices? If so then this is a slap on the wrist and the behavior will continue.
Could someone explain the difference between cramming and wire fraud? Do you need an Inc. after your name for the former?
They sent me a new phone as a replacement minus the back cover.
Damn if I can't find the old phone to ship back; I thought given long enough it would show itself (two houses it could be or not be at)
Maybe instead of a refund they'll just mark off the old S5...
The new one works great BTW, just stuck using a wallet type carrier as it has a water resistant gasket (back cover).
Looks like it has all finally bore fruit.
Not really. Is anyone going to jail for this scam? Or are they just giving back a portion of the profits they made by defrauding people?
Are they less likely to try the same scam again? Probably.
Slamming is one reason pre paid phones are the success they are now. No fighting to get the billing to quit.
Provide good service or else I won't continue to be a customer.
A phone was never supposed to be a credit card for pay add on services. When this was allowed, the abuse and fraud followed.
I call BS...
I realize the story is specifically about T-Mobile, but overall it's about the "mysterious" charges that end up on peoples bills across all carriers.
I worked in Sprint's billing department (hell on earth, yes), and I dealt with these calls about 25% of my day. I was personally allotted $15 per call, that's per customer to refund these charges, explain how they got there, personally block them from happening again wherever possible, and then give a long lecture on how to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. And if it was more? "Hey, boss! I need you to approve $50 in refunds for this account!" "Okay, no problem!" Half the time the charges could be traced back to a parent letting their 7 year old play games on their phone without oversight, but we refunded them anyway. There are many different ways for these types of charges to get on a phone bill, and we always happily refunded them, blocked misc. services or whatever ever it took, and cordially thanked them for being diligent when it came to examining their monthly statement. The bottom line is, at least at Sprint, I never saw a charge that someone had to have blindly agreed to, yet we refunded them left and right anyway.
If you had the opposite experience with Sprint, it wasn't within the last 5 years (major reform) or you weren't routed to my department.
It's up to the customer to carefully examine every line item on their bill every single month and that's that.
I get the feeling this will get modded straight to hell, I hope at least one person with sensibility reads it first.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
At least you got some unsolicited text messages ;-) Most victims of this scheme, my wife included, never even got that. There was literally no connection between activity on our accounts and the unauthorized charges.
To this day I find it unfathomable T-Mobile would allow any company to add charges to one of their customer's bills on their say-so. At the very least, I'd expect a "Show an example of a text message FROM customer TO creditor" requirement, something T-Mobile (and apparently the other companies to, according to Legere) never bothered to require.
Insanity.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Third-party service provider billing Certain third-party charges (games, apps, ringtones, etc.) may be included on your T-Mobile bill. If you want to block those third-party charges from being included on your T-Mobile bill, you may do so at no charge by visiting www.my.T-Mobile.com or calling T-Mobile Customer Service.
I have used it and I have not seen any such slammed bills over a number of years. But one constant complaint I have is that, every time I go to Niagara Falls, (I am an Indian American, all my relatives and friends from India insist on visiting Niagara when they come here. I have gone there some 35 times, might qualify as a guide too ;-)), my T-mobile phone would connect to Rogers Wireless and they will bill me through T-mobile. I have blocked international calls, international roaming and general roaming. Still it gets through and I have to call them to have these reversed.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
There is no hope of halting these practices without fines that take far more than the crime generated. The courts have enabled white collar crime by allowing these companies to steal and pay less than the sum stolen in fines. We should also consider a seizure of company assets and a forced shut down of the enterprise as it was an ongoing criminal conspiracy and the RICO Acts should be in play.