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Woman Faces $9,100 Verizon Bill For Data She Says She Didn't Use (dslreports.com)
A Verizon Wireless customer says she received a bill of $9,100 for hundreds of gigabytes of data usage which never consumed. The woman told the Cleveland Plain Dealer she was on Verizon's 4GB shared data plan, and like any normal person, the bill of $8,535 from Verizon for consuming 569GB of data in a matter of few days doesn't compute well with her. The problem, as DSLR reports, is that when she tried to find out what caused the data usage, Verizon website told her "the activity you are trying to perform is currently unavailable. Please try again later." She couldn't and switched to T-Mobile, after which Verizon charged her a penalty of $600.
If $600 is now referred to as a "plenty", what would the $9,100 be?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Verizon sure did charger her a-plenty.
manishs - Try reading posts out loud to see if they make sense. Just using the spell checker won't catch these errors.
Thank you for writing the needful.
Or did Verizon not send them. I get these constantly when I'm towards 90% of my monthly allotment.
to go jump in a lake and hich a ride on a slow boat to china, i would NOT fork over that kind of money to ANYBODY, one reason is i dont have it and if i did it would not be going to a god damned phone company
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Verizon and Comcast websites are the worst I ever have to deal with. Routinely broken and return "Sorry, we can't perform that action at the moment. And actually, we aren't sorry." messages.
Instead of the crappy DSLReport blurb - http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2016/09/verizon_data_overages_other_ch.html
So she couldn't try again later? Where does it say that? The "article" was bad enough, this summary makes it even worse.
Started spamming me to buy more data because I only have 20% remaining. That's funny because I never used it and never even turned on the WiFi hotspot. Needless to say, when the trial period is over I won't be buying their ridiculously overpriced plan.
Now we know what happens to all of that data that's routed through /speedtest.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I pay $30/month for 20 Gigs of 3G. If I ever exceed it (I haven't), my bandwidth is throttled to 50KB/s until the end of the month.
Verizon are charging (8535/569) $15/Gig? Incredible. Isn't there a US telecoms regulator?
she was afraid of being put on hold.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Just about a month ago, Verizon was reporting that my wife had used some ridiculous amount (can't remember exactly how much) of data on her phone. It turned out that both their website & their phone app were reporting MB as GB. It took them several days to fix it.
I imagine some older person on a fixed income could possibly have a stroke or heart attack from shock at such a bill. With all the algorithms gathering data on the data we use, you think they would invest in making sure of, I don't know, umm.. accuracy?
"I told them that I won't pay the bill,'' Gerbus said. "I can either wait until they take it to a collection agency or when they take it to court. Either way, my credit history will be ruined. I can go bankrupt here.''
It might be wise to consider (or threaten) suing first. Lawsuits bring you to the front of the bureaucracy line, and can resolve the issue without bankruptcy.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
they **** you in the *** every time
who that kid stole from.
You have to very, very specifically _try_ to get that much data on a mobile device. We're talking running torrents, binge watching Netflix 18+ hours a day for the entire month, etc.
While those things are certainly possible, you don't "accidentally" do them. You might acci
It's a billing error, and Verizon needs to own up to it.
On that note: always check your bill, and never, ever let any company have an open ended billing mechanism (e.g. overage charges) against you. Verizon offers "safety mode", you should use it.
I don't have to worry If their measurement system messes up and says I used 12ZB of data or I happen to use 5GB on netflix my bill will always be the same.
It's mostly just better for peace of mind.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
So Verizon's explanation for how the data got so high is apparently because she accessed Amazon 400 times during that period. So they actually think visiting a website 400 times would account for 560 gigabytes of data? Over a gigabyte per visit. How stupid can they be? More proof that signing up with a company that can just randomly bill you whatever they want is not a good idea. Verizon is stuck in the stone age.
Why not link to the source article instead of a summary? It has a lot more detail on what supposedly happened.
Step One: Send them a link to www.brachs.com/halloween-products/ with an appropriately click-baity note attached.
Step Two: Listen to them howl as they realize shitty modern website "design" just ate a significant part of their monthly bandwidth.
Verizon should ask itself how this woman managed to download 569 GB of data in a few days without having her download speed throttled.
It's a shame I'm not a lawyer. I'd gladly file a very nasty countersuit, pro bono, to teach these monopolies a lesson.
I see you aren't a Verizon customer. "This service is temporarily unavailable" means "We shut this down 5 years ago but never told anybody, not even our CSRs." It's all designed to run you around in circles until you give up and just pay the bill.
I read the internet for the articles.
Spelling error. https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
I have long wanted to be able to place a credit limit on my phone such that the phone company will cut me off when I have reached my limit. Much like the credit card companies do.
I skirt the issue by using a provider that pretends to offer unlimited voice and data for a fixed monthly cost, but there are still issues of roaming, cramming and the like.
So, at the speeds Verizon provides me, 569 gig in a few days is a physical impossibility. Definitely agree with other posters - sue them for the max amount allowable in small claims court. Bet they settle without you ever actually talking to a lawyer.
Deja Moo: The distinct feeling that you've heard this bull before.
Slo? New? Da?
70GB in one day on a phone seems unlikely. So did they mess up the counting? added some other users phones to their account?
Marf
She might have left the personal hotspot exposed. Weak password, or gave it to someone to use once.
An unscrupulous person might use it to stream. Best to shut it off when not needed.
http://verizonmath.blogspot.co...
This is silly. This degree of activity on this sort of plan should have raised a (red) flag well before this amount in charges were accrued. It was probably nothing more than some dodgy app on her phone run riot.
So, does anybody want to run the numbers on 569 gigabytes on a cell phone over "just a few days" ?
How does that even compare to the max rate of download those things are even capable of?
Is it based on around the clock downloading which we know isn't reasonable either, especially if there are periods when she wasn't at home or where she could be charging the phone as we know downloading eats up battery at a pretty decent clip.
This looks extremely questionable to me, and potentially impossible to achieve. (Of course somebody with more specific information could do the calculations I can't, and am probably too lazy to do today anyway.)
http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2016/09/verizon_agrees_to_drop_florida_1.html
Verizon dropped most of the charges.
They did steal over $600 from the poor woman.
Well, dam wifi assist feature
I am a Verizon customer, and this is bullshit. Their site works fine. And even if it didn't, a quick call will get you the info you need. That the supposed customer in the article switched to T-Mobile after seeing that message is rather fishy.
... I'm not from a country where suing people is a common occurrence but usually the way you fix is through the beauracracy. With a few sensible steps to shortcut the process.
You call/email/talk to people until you find someone that has any measure of power, and escalate to management as necessary.
If you have a bill that is "signed" by the manager of some collections department etc of the company (even though it would have been processed by some underling), you politely request that person's phone number and establish a one-to-one dialog, explaining calmly that it's clearly a mistake and that you expect the charges to be reversed and a full explanation of what has happened.
If you have a name of someone who is, or should be, responsible within the company, you can often infer an email address. Firstname.lastname@companyname.com or some such. If you have one person's email, you can infer another's.
Phone and-or email at least weekly. Ideally keep a polite, calm,reasonable email paper trail, copy in anyone you've talked to along the way. Don't get angry but do insist that it's clearly a mistake, that you expect someone to take responsibility and that you expect the charges to be reversed.
The biggest surprise, as with so many news stories, is that it became a news story at all. If you are a squeaky enough wheel, you basically become someone's full-time job to figure out some kind of solution.
I just dialed #data and got a link to a website that gave me the same error message descirbed in the article.
So I'll say it again. This lady proves that Karma does exist.
And I just went to the website, viewed the bill for the billing cycle that ended 9/12, viewed usage by line, and saw how the data usage was broken down for each of the 7 phones on my account. It works fine.
Verizon in my experience is pretty reasonable. They do however make mistakes. Work with customer service. As for the $600 fee there is no $600 fee for ending a contract early that means they leant her money on a phone that she now has to repay plus possibly a much smaller penalty. This sounds like a person who acted impulsively. Most of the comments above talking about suing. Suing requires first acting in good faith. So she needs to act in good faith and in the very least talk to them.
I have gotten that when trying to pay my phone bill. So I go away, forget about it for some days, and get charged a late fee.
That "service is temporarily unavailable" message earns them extra cash, so why would anybody be surprised that they don't fix it?
So these stories always bring up more skepticism than fact. Is the lady single, does she have kids? Could it be she had some app sucking data down? Verizon is my carrier and they should have been able to tell her what kind of data and from what source. I can access this from the Verizon web site or app. Also I find it sketchy that rather then work with Verizon on this she just moves to another carrier? I think some clarification is in order before condemning Verizon here.
Verizon always sends me notifications through text or email when I close in on my data cap? Did this person ignore them?
Would you not think that a large technology company could, and would, have a service flagged in the event that such an unusual activity was occurring on a line, and at least notify/warn a customer?!
It makes one think that Verizon is taking advantage of an error in a system; focusing on revenue only.
This reinforces my perception of Verizon as being an 800 pound monopolizing gorilla.
I have had endless experiences with Verizon's bureaucratic nightmares. They make it way too difficult to get anything done.
Especially compared to any other competitor.
For example, if you do not have Call Forwarding available on your land lines (which all other carriers include in their pkgs), it takes Verizon "up to 48 hours" to invoke a Call Forward request (where other carriers effect a Call Forward request virtually immediately - regardless of ANY other service request that may be pending). It has actually take me over 36 hours to see my requests fulfilled. Too late to meet my needs!
I see things like this consistently with Verizon. Their po;licies and structure are still antiquated, cumbersome, and costly.
Why even bother with Verizon?
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
http://www.cleveland.com/busin...
Don't blame me, it's usually 2 in the morning when I post