AT&T Bills Elderly Customer $24,298.93 For Landline Dial-Up Service

McGruber writes: 83-year-old Woodland Hills, California resident Ron Dorff usually pays $51 a month to AT&T for a landline, which he uses to access the Internet via an old-school, low-speed AOL dial-up subscription.... but then, in March, AT&T sent him a bill for $8,596.57. He called AT&T and their service rep couldn't make heads or tails of the bill, so she said she'd send a technician to his house. None came, so Dorff figured that everything was ok.

Dorff's next monthly bill was for $15,687.64, bringing his total outstanding debt to AT&T, including late fees, to $24,298.93. If he didn't pay by May 8, AT&T warned, his bill would rise to at least $24,786.16. Droff then called David Lazarus, business columnist for the LA Times, who got in touch with AT&T, who wasted little time in deciding it would waive the more than $24,000 in charges.

AT&T spokeshole Georgia Taylor claims Dorff's modem somehow had started dialing a long-distance number when it accessed AOL, and the per-minute charges went into orbit as he stayed connected for hours.

AT&T declined to answer the LA Times questions about why AT&T didn't spot the problem itself and proactively take steps to fix things? AT&T also declined to elaborate on whether AT&T's billing system is capable of spotting unusual charges and, if so, why it doesn't routinely do so.

Comments

Re:AT&T Autopay - Ha!

[monkeyzoo]

So, there was no billing error here. The guy actually had his modem making long-distance calls for inordinate amounts of time. Doesn't seem like an AT&T error. Though it definitely sucks for the old man/woman!

What I don't get though is what the heck kind of plan he has. Even if he was online 24 hours a day for 30 days, to get to $15,687, that would mean a per-minute rate of $0.363!!!

Pretty much no service providers catch things...

[Miguelito]

Like this.

AT&T also declined to elaborate on whether AT&T's billing system is capable of spotting unusual charges and, if so, why it doesn't routinely do so.

I had my own issues with our local phone company. Several years (yes years) after I bought and moved into my house I got a visit from the Police. Hearing a knock at the door at 10pm on a Saturday night scared the hell out of me... I have a gated yard, so it meant someone jumped the 4ft wall just to come up and knock. The said they'd gotten a 911 hangup. I've never had my land line hooked up in this house, and no phones plugged into any lines anywhere. They shrugged it off. A couple weeks later, more police visiting mid day, same reason. I called the phone company and they had no record of service at this address, the police (supposedly) also called, and everyone figured it was fixed.

Nope... 3rd visit from cops, even they were getting annoyed at this point. This time I spent nearly 2 hours on the phone with phone company. They finally kicked me over to another department (tech guys I think) who found that a previous tenant, years earlier, had the emergency only (life-line) service. It had been "disconnected" in the system in every way as far as billing and such were concerned, but wasn't actually physically disconnected. The tech guys were finally able to fix it.

This is a case where you'd think their system would be able to detect that calls were being placed by a residence that had no service. Nope.

Re:AT&T Autopay - Ha!

[mrchaotica]

No, I mean like how the old, old AT&T (before the monopoly was broken up) used to only allow "approved devices" on its landline network, gave you exactly one choice of phone (the Model 500), and had to send a technician out to hard-wire it, using screw terminals, to the phone network (i.e., this was before RJ-11).

Re:AT&T Autopay - Ha!

[Technician]

Wow, Where are the old timers?

One of the older viruses/malware would redirect dial up just to collect termination fees. This script mailware was most often associated with porn sites., but not always. The frequency of this exploit tended to die down with growing broadband use over dialup. I first saw issues of this with dial up modems. My early cure for this as a prevention was tu use an Actiontech Dual PC modem connected to a router in the same configuration as a broadband modem and router setup.

This provided high immunity to the exploit as the modem contained the ISP dial up number and a compromised attack website could not log into the modem to change the numberr. As a network modem it did not respond to the Hayes AT command set.

A common practice for ohters was to change the escape charactor, but this only provided limited protection as a changed configuration file for common dialer programs could still be altered. Hidden and Read only attributes in DOS addad another defence with limited success.

Old school dial up was compromised by a very old attack against dial up modem use.