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.

Comments

New form of measurement?

[Nidi62]

If $600 is now referred to as a "plenty", what would the $9,100 be?

Re:New form of measurement?

[Anonymous Coward]

One and a half decaplenties.

Re:New form of measurement?

[hey!]

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.

Re:New form of measurement?

[Mephistophocles]

Wow. Uh, no! First off, if she sues them (which is what I was clearly indicating should happen), SHE's the plaintiff. And no, even if they were to sue her, they'd have to do it in the county of her residence, or the court has no jurisdiction. You can't just sue someone in NY when your business is in CO and she lives in GA, because you think the NY court is going to rule in your favor.

Secondly, regarding arbitration - even if they produce a contract that they can prove she agreed to (far from a certainty), they're probably not going to want to actually go through with arbitration on a $10K claim.

Thirdly, your last comment is so asinine I'm not sure how to respond to it. The arbitrator is not biased against the litigant because there's some shady deal in which they make "millions" by Verizon bringing them cases. Verizon (and all major corporations) generally avoid actual courtrooms and arbitration whenever possible because it costs one hell of a lot of money (even if they win). So, no, that "obvious bias" doesn't exist except in your fevered imagination. If there's a bias (and I'm certainly not insinuating that the AAA is always as impartial as it claims to be) it wouldn't be for that reason.

Re:New form of measurement?

[SeaFox]

If $600 is now referred to as a "plenty", what would the $9,100 be?

She should just cut them a check for $91.00 -- they'll consider the bill paid in full.

A link to the real article

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of the crappy DSLReport blurb - http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2016/09/verizon_data_overages_other_ch.html

SpeedTest

[Thelasko]

Now we know what happens to all of that data that's routed through /speedtest.

Verizon Has Issues

[JumbleGuy]

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.

Re:Verizon Has Issues

[AntronArgaiv]

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.

sue first

[phantomfive]

"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.

Re:sue first

[networkBoy]

That's how I resolved my dispute with Chase bank when they did some seriously underhanded sh!t.
I told them that they were trying to get blood from a turnip as I would rather burn my money and go insolvent.
They threatened to sue me, and I replied with: "Please do, I dare you to find a jury that will take your side on this".

After that my interest rate was 0.00000% till my balance was paid.

Re:sue first

[jetkust]

Chase was trying to take his turnips because they though they had blood in them. So he threatened to sue them, but lost interest in the turnips already well before Chase gave them back.

Re:sue first

[networkBoy]

The agreement in question was that I agreed to binding arbitration; the moment they said sue they lost that.

As to the rest of the story, since people asked...

I had a *sizable* life of loan deal with them at 2.99%. (about $30K, rolled a car loan, student loan, etc. into it).
When the banking crisis hit no one wanted to carry these low interest loans with long payoffs, and no one would buy them from the lenders either. Since the agreement was for "Life of loan" they were stuck on the interest rate, but the loophole they found was that the minimum payment was not locked in.
They jacked the minimum payment with only 15 days notice by 250%. Naturally I (and many others) was unable to pay so the account went delinquent. Now that the account was past due they could jack the interest to 29.99% APR. That is $750/mo in interest up from $75/month. I should mention that the day I received the increase notice I tried calling and saying to close my account and that I did not agree to the new terms, I was informed that option was not being made available in this case.

As the account slipped further and further behind I tried an idea based on the common practice of companies like this sending out a check "cash this to enroll in our credit monitoring service" or whatnot.

I drafted a repayment agreement at 0.000% (I did borrow the money, I should pay it back, but by their actions I decided they forfeit being able to earn any money from me) and wrote a check for the first payment.

I looked up their business office (*not* payment office) and mailed the letter and check (both referencing the other and acceptance of terms by cashing check) attention: Account Manager.

They cashed the check, so when I got my next bill showing the payment was made, but the terms not modified I called to inform them of the billing error. Hilarity ensued.

It took nearly a week of back and forth, but finally they threatened to sue me and I replied with my dare.

A brief silence was followed with "please hold on a moment" and a very unhappy but authoritative sounding person basically accepting my offer (they countered that they wanted the balance paid in 5 years, I was offering 6... since they agreed to the 0% interest I agreed to the 12 month acceleration).

-nb

Link to more complete source story

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not link to the source article instead of a summary? It has a lot more detail on what supposedly happened.

Re:Verizon's lame Amazon explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Verizon's lame Amazon explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Accidental Overage?

[ZorinLynx]

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.

Impossible

[Mephistophocles]

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.