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

That's not how it works

[drinkypoo]

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?

Yeah, that's not how it works. My sleazebag WISP (Digital Path) claims they have extensive uptime monitoring, so they should know when you have internet access and they could bill you accordingly, right? But they base their uptime on the link state, so if the link to your mountain is down (they bring in access from something like four mountaintops away, hop hop hop hop) but your link to your mountain is up (the PoPs are on mountaintops, obviously) then their logging says your connection is good when in fact you couldn't access the internet — and that's the basis on which they will bill you if you call and complain about extensive downtime. Billing, however, happens like clockwork every month. My internet connection is down all the time, but billing is never late.

They don't give one fuck about you, and unless forced to act like it, they surely won't. They just want your money.