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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.
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.
AT&T keeps requesting that I enroll in autopay. I've resisted for fear of crap like this.
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
"AT&T spokeshole"
Is this part of the new genderless naming styles from the AP?
"long distance"
What is this, 1997?
This isn't an errant bill or anything. The person called long distance that much in two months.
And AT&T waived it after it was pointed out. So why freak out about this?
Finally, I'm really ashamed of slashdot approving an article which refers to an AT&T spokesperson as a "spokeshole" for no reason. Georgia Taylor didn't do anything to deserve that.
Show some maturity, slashdot.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Nevermind. My math is wrong and I am an idiot. :) I forgot to multiply by 30 in there...
By my calculations, if he were to remain online 24 hours a day, this is the charge he would receive at a rate of 19 cents per minute. That seems about standard long distance fare for a POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) line. Thus, billing questions aside, why would AT&T not notice a phone call lasting for 30 days!?
You'd do well at AT&T
I know right??? :)
People still dial in to AOL with a modem in 2015? *That* is the real "News for Nerds"
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Sounds like BS to me. A service rep can't spot itemized long distance charges? More like, "We're gonna start making bundles off this dotty old geezer. Keep him going as long as possible."
Have gnu, will travel.
There's really nothing to see here. Except that long distance with per-minute charges are still a thing. And AOL is still a thing, I guess? I definitely would not have called that. And old people are easily tricked into buying both those things. I don't think addressing the ease with which old people are tricked is on the agenda. Whether it's aluminum siding or their uncle in Uganda, tricking old people is just way too easy. And phone companies will just let you run up tens of thousands of dollars in arbitrary charges in one month, and let you keep doing it for several months when you don't pay the first one, that's definitely been a thing for a while. I'm actually a bit surprised AT&T waived it. In the stories I've heard in the past, the telcos usually put up a pretty good fight about that sort of thing.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I had an elderly customer stop into my computer repair shop. He had a laptop with XP. It caught cryptowall 3.0 and all his files are now permanently irrecoverable. I told him XP was unsafe to use on the internet and he insisted that it "works just fine," you know, because he know more than me about computer security...while his laptop is sitting here with a virus on it. He said a ton of people have told him to stop using it and he ignored them all. He drove here in a REALLY expensive car by the way so I don't think money is an issue. He's just a stubborn, arrogant asshole.
Now how many people do you think told the guy in the story to switch off of dialup. I personally have had 5 people lately that refuse to stop using the "AOL Browser" even though it crashes every 5 minutes. I hate to say it but I blame the guy. He's using an outdated product and he doesn't truly know how it works and then a lack of support for the ancient product caused it to fail over to a secondary dial number that was considered long distance.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Kudos to then for waiving this.
Although the call(s) really cost them virtually nothing, they had the legal right to demand payment.
Wisely, they ate it.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
docsigma2000: jesus christ man ...!!!!!! FUCK FUCK FUCK
docsigma2000: my son is sooooooo dead
c8info: Why?
docsigma2000: hes been looking at internet web sites in fucking EUROPE
docsigma2000: HE IS SURFING LONG DISTANCE
docsigma2000: our fucking phone bill is gonna be nuts
c8info: Ooh, this is bad. Surfing long distance adds an extra $69.99 to your bill per hour.
docsigma2000:
docsigma2000: is there some plan we can sign up for???
docsigma2000: cuz theres some cool stuff in europe, but i dun wanna pauy that much
c8info: Sorry, no. There is no plan. you'll have to live with it.
docsigma2000: o well, i ccan live without europe intenet sites.
docsigma2000: but till i figure out how to block it hes sooooo dead
c8info: By the way, I'm from Europe, your chatting long distance.
** docsigma2000 has quit (Connection reset by peer)
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
You'd fit in at Verizon :-)
http://verizonmath.blogspot.jp...
It's funny, but it's been this way for ages - the phone company will essentially give you unlimited credit. Mr Dorff is living on about $1500 a month. How many credit cards with $25K limits do you think he has? I don't understand why phone companies don't just set a max for your bill and then shut you off if it goes over that, at least for billable items like long distance.
Funny thing is I did all my online gaming, hacking, file sharing, and so on with 28Kbps on 200Mhz P2 w/ 64MB RAM back in the day. Worked well for most things unless transferring "large" data. The "client-server" apps were better than Web 2.0 and used less bandwith. Most importantly, most people I knew always turned it off and disconnected it after use. Hackers had a narrow window to hit you, then only so much time to use your box. Plus, combined with good authentication, a point-to-point connection over dialup suffered *zero problems* that we see with businesses connecting over the Internet. That's true to this day: the very reason many use dial-up for remote access or leased lines for branch access.
This person probably just had "ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality with very limited use of the Internet. Lots of older people just do email, online news, and so on. Yet, as an alternative to leased lines, one of my modern schemes for robust remote access is a combination of broadband Internet and dial-up (or satellite). Most data is transmitted through the Internet via a VPN. Authentication, VPN configuration, highly sensitive data, and so on over dialup to highly secure system (all support serial ports). A link layer encryption suffices here. Plus, an efficient fall-back method for apps and comms to use dialup in case Internet is knocked out. Even with power out, dialup over POTS usually still keeps on working in this area. Dialup still kicks ass in 2015 for those wise enough to play to its strengths: low risk, high reliability, and *free long distance*. Elderly person forgot that last part.
- Nick P, Security Engineer/Researcher (high assurance)
This isn't an errant bill or anything. The person called long distance that much in two months.
And AT&T waived it after it was pointed out. So why freak out about this?
Finally, I'm really ashamed of slashdot approving an article which refers to an AT&T spokesperson as a "spokeshole" for no reason. Georgia Taylor didn't do anything to deserve that.
Show some maturity, slashdot.
Well, let's see here.
Firstly, there's no immediate feedback on phone charges. A running faucet or light left on will get noticed and turned off - people *want* to be sensible about their expenses.
Imagine a running faucet going unnoticed for 4 weeks. Phone services are like that.
Secondly, when the user does nothing different and suddenly gets these charges, can you really blame the user?
Imagine you work adjacent to the waterfront district, the Queen Mary happens to be docked there, and your phone calls are picked up by their tower and considered an international call - you've just racked up several hundred dollars for no apparent reason. Is it the user's fault?
Thirdly, there's no safeguards or limit switches in the system. You can't say to the phone company "I want service capped at $100 per month, alert me if it goes over".
You put the phone back in the cradle and the plunger switch doesn't disengage properly, the phone is still "off hook", and you go away for the weekend. When you get back, you've had a line open for 76 hours and will be billed accordingly (depending on your service plan).
And finally, and the one that gives people a burn about these issues, there's the issue of elites and the plebes.
You see, he *only* was able to get things straightened out because an elite was kind enough to help him. When he tried to straighten it out the phone company blew him off, but when an elite got involved it was sorted out immediately.
This sort of customer service - where the customer doesn't have to fight tooth-and-nail for everyday consideration from a big company, isn't available to you and me.
It's a perk of the elites.
It was not a billing error, this guy spent nearly all month on long distance with AOL.
No sir I dont like it.
AOL was once the largest site on the Internet. They were doing scalability before Microsoft invented the word. Under Michael Manos, they've been doing really innovative stuff like a lights-out, zero employee datacenter [1] and the recent micro-datacenter [2]. Their stuff is highly efficient, maintenance is scheduled in least costly way, and it mostly manages itself. Most of the "modern," "cutting-edge," "sophisticated" companies on Y Combinator's hiring page can't say the same about their infrastructure. Funniest part is that, despite all the case studies on highscalability.com etc, so many of them are still "trying to figure out" how they'll scale the exact same kind of apps. IT industry rarely learns from its successes or mistakes: keeps reinventing the wheel instead. AOL's old school approach just identifies the problem, applies a solution that works, invents one otherwise, and moves on to getting business done. The one thing to emulate, other than cool, datacenter design. :)
[1] https://loosebolts.wordpress.c...
[2] http://www.zdnet.com/article/a...!
Nick P, Security Engineer/Researcher
I think the bigger scam is the fact people are still paying for domestic long distance.
Like this.
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.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
All of history. Old news. No story there.
If the summary is correct, and additionally if AT&T had insisted on payment, the customer would have had grounds for suing the modem manufacturer for dialing the wrong number, or AOL for causing the expensive number to be dialed.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
You're a thief too cowardly to do your own stealing.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
It's still an insane amount of money per minute even if your math is right. First of all, he probably wasn't on for the whole month. And second, the highest you could possibly pay with AT&T is $0.42 per minute peak. It is $0.365 per minute off peak and $0.15 on weekends. It is less than that for in-state long distance. These rates are only possible if you have no long distance plan. I find it extremely unlikely that he would have a landline with no long distance plan, but even if he has no long distance plan, it would not be mathematically possible to get a $15,687 bill in only one month's time.
Assuming 31 days in the month and only 9 weekend days (9 is the minimum number of weekend days you can get in a 31 day month):
$5,781.60 off peak
$6,652.80 peak
$1,944.00 weekends
Total $14,378.40
Again, this is assuming he never lost connection for 24 hours a day for 30 days AND assuming he had no long distance plan AND assuming the number that he dialed was not in-state. So the phone bill is wrong assuming the worst of all possible situations, and since the worst situation is extremely unlikely, the phone bill is even MORE wrong.
Personally, I think AOL should share some responsibility, as they should indicate if a number is long distance. It should not be up to the consumer to know this, since sometimes AT&T charges long distance for phones with the same area code. I have had AT&T charge long distance for a town that is only 20 miles away by car.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
then you can dispute the charges. Assuming you're in the States that is. I've heard it's a little harder in Europe (America has a few more laws about loads that kick in with CCs), but by no means impossible.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Is that there is still dial-up AOL.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Taxes and fees..
The "client-server" apps were better than Web 2.0
Could they run on a Mac even if the developer used Windows? Or vice versa?
and used less bandwith.
In theory, a web application that uses HTML5 WebSockets could be as lean as a native client-server app. But in practice, it's not done because it would increase the developers' costs, including cost of providing a fallback for browsers that lack WebSockets, more than it would decrease the cost of providing the service.
Something like this happened to me with MCI when I was in college. Not originally from a state with "local toll" charges, I even asked the MCI rep ahead of time to confirm a no-toll number from my ISP's list. A month later, I had about $850 in toll charges and absolutely no way to fight it. Not quite $24k but it was a big dent in my budget. Let's just say I wasn't sad when I Worldcom got into so much trouble a year or two later.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
Yes. It was ugly.
Also, it is probably helpful to note that Southwestern Bell, a company that had a very bad reputation with customers, bought the name AT&T. There is no connection between the old AT&T and the company called AT&T today.
Google Fiber can't come soon enough!
It is astounding how bad our ISPs are that we are literally lining up and begging for data-warehouser Google to come along and insert themselves between us and the internet.
And I totally agree with you. I needs it, my precious.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
AT&T has been dicking with our bills for years. They have added "insurance" fees and plan-change fees without asking or warning, for example. When confronted with it, they usually pull a Steve Urkel: "Oh gee, how did that little charge get on there?"
Table-ized A.I.
G.E telephone which was bought out by sprint did this to a friend who lived in their coverage area (but ironically 200 yards from my SBC covered house). They said the same thing, it's just the way it is. We called the public utilities commission of our state and complained about it. Within two weeks he had a credit amount on his bill and evidently the phone company had to pay back quite a few people. This was shortly before Verizon purchased them.
I'm not surprised Verizon sprint tried this too. I had the nextel phone because of specific coverage and when sprint purchased them, they attempted to charge me more as well as failed to maintain coverage areas. They would call me about 3 times a week, even after being told not to call any more several times, to request I purchase a sprint plan along with a new phone and 2 year contract. I told them my contract with nextel wasn't up and they explained they owned nextel so it would be ok and I explained to them that if they owned nextel, it shouldn't matter but if I was changing contract companies, it sure as hell wouldn't be with the company that screwed nextel coverage up.
Sorry about that tangent. The point is, check with your state utilities commission when crap like this happens. Every state has one but might call it something different. Often just having them look into it is enough to get them to fix the issues.
I was thinking the same. I was wondering if it was really a dialer causing this or not.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
20 years ago there were new billing policies being put into place in different regions. I was in a California hotel over one weekend for a business meeting, and used the corporate network's local access number to connect and work all day, since my employer had bought a cheaper airline ticket that meant I had to stay over an extra day. I was shocked on checking out to be billed at $0.50 an hour for that time. Being from Florida I had no idea that local calls were charged at that rate from a commercial venue, such as a hotel, and there was nothing anywhere in the hotel mentioning this. Some time later the local Florida telco also implemented the same kind of charges. The company hadn't covered any "extra" charges, such as the meals for that extra layover day. I didn't have enough to pay the phone bill and had to call my local supervisor - at 5:30AM - to get the company to cover the charge before I could leave the hotel to catch my plane. They fired me later that week, and deducted those phone charges from my severance pay.
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.
I don't know how it is in the US, but here in Norway you can dial our equivalent of 911 from any cell phone, connecting to any tower in range regardless if it has service or even a SIM card and I assume landlines work on the same principle. That the service was "disconnected" just means they don't have any obligation to keep it working, but they're not going to block any 911 call ever, I don't know if there's a law but the bad publicity would be a disaster. So this is probably by design and a feature, not a bug but customer service was probably not aware of this.
They might not even have access to the raw call log, since their user interface probably revolves around services and calls tied to a service. After all how often do you have a phone line with no service dialing 911 - because that's the only place you can reach - then calling customer service complaining that the call came through? This was a 0.01% corner case and I'm not surprised they thought it "impossible" and had to escalate to someone with real knowledge of the inner workings of the physical network.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The most interesting thing (and an apparent hardware error from their side) is that this line actually made phone calls.
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.
They should realise that after a call from the police about the issue. A proper customer service rep should also immediately transfer such a call to a higher level, the moment he realises that it really is the police contacting them, and that there is something going on that is seemingly impossible.
"They are now, and have always been the same company, they just had a trial separation for a few years."
When SBC bought the AT&T name, the poor managers at SBC became "AT&T". When I said "there is no connection", I meant that there was no continuity of management.
I'm amazed at why AT&T doesn't pro-actively detect this.
Fun fact: In Argentina, by law, if the bill reaches twice what you usually pay, the ISP is forced to notify you before allowing further charges. So in this case, at $102, they should have called the person and notified of the event before it escalated further.
How recently was this effected? Elisa (Finland) billed me over EUR 1,500 (about 20x my usual spend) before suspending my service without any form of warning in the late 2000s. I asked of them at that time why they hadn't at least called me sooner, say, when it had reached something like EUR 500.
I've since gotten in to the industry, and something I am particularly concerned about is "bill shock".
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
... or why AT&T couldn't tell what was what when he called. A call from local media, and the whole thing is figured out in seconds??? If it was "long distance", there'd be line items (i.e. each. individual. call.) on that bill.