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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.
Or did Verizon not send them. I get these constantly when I'm towards 90% of my monthly allotment.
"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."
This, folks, is why you should pay attention to who runs for state attorney general.
Companies get away with this bullshit because private individuals can't hold them to account. It'd cost more than $9100, even counting your time as free, to fight this as an individual. So companies know they can do to you what they please.
This is why we have consumer protection laws, to protect people from bullshit they can't afford to litigate. A shot across the bow from your state's consumer protection bureau counts for a lot more than an angry contract termination call. And if your state AG's office doesn't have a consumer protection division, or if there aren't consumer protection laws in your state, well you're SOL until someone changes that.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So she streamed 400 movies within the time period of a week or so ...
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.
Verizon should realize that it's unlikely an individual is going to pay an almost $10k data bill.
So...why do they even allow you to run one up? By default, you should be shut off if you go over "n" times your limit (say your limit is 2G...after 6G, your data service is shut off). That way, Verizon gets their "nominal" overage charges, and nobody's all sue-happy. Why isn't this a thing? If you're some kind of commercial super user, you could sign away that protection, but for 99.44% of their users, it would eliminate this bad publicity.
This, folks, is why you should pay attention to who runs for state attorney general.
Companies get away with this bullshit because private individuals can't hold them to account. It'd cost more than $9100, even counting your time as free, to fight this as an individual. So companies know they can do to you what they please.
This is why we have consumer protection laws, to protect people from bullshit they can't afford to litigate. A shot across the bow from your state's consumer protection bureau counts for a lot more than an angry contract termination call. And if your state AG's office doesn't have a consumer protection division, or if there aren't consumer protection laws in your state, well you're SOL until someone changes that.
But, but.. Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem St. Reagan said so. Besides, the free market will fix this. It always magically corrects all wrongs done to consumers by companies whose only obligation is to their shareholders.
So... how's my Rand fan-boy impression coming along?
In order to rack up ~600GB of data usage in 10 days she would have had to be watching full HD video (~3GB/h) every hour of every day.
Of course that highly unlikely. And it's also highly unlikely it was an unattended device. Amazon, like other streaming providers, requires user interaction after every couple streams to prevent an unattended device from streaming data endlessly.
Additionally, on a small mobile device, Amazon/netflix/etc will not send a full HD stream (3GB/h) but rather a smaller resolution stream suitable for the device (full HD would be utterly useless and just a waste for everyone) and at a small fraction of the full HD bitrate. We're talking a couple hundred KB/s throughput or about 1GB/hour.
So the Amazon excuse it, at best, paper thin. It's a billing error.
400 movies, 1.5 hours each (average?) - if she was streaming continuously it would take 25 days to watch all 400 movies.
At 20Mb/s, if each move was on average 2GB, it would take 10 days to stream all the content (not watch, just the time it takes to download over 20Mb/s.) If you have consistent 20 Mbps over 3G, then your speed is better than I get! (Verizon standard LTE is typically between 5 & 12 Mbps).
So, something is very very wrong, and someone is failing to do basic math verification in their analysis.
They actually charge $5 per month extra for that "safety mode". It's ridiculously underhanded and sleazy and one of the reasons I'd rather not use Verizon.