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Comcast May Have Enrolled Thousands in a Near-Worthless Protection Program Without Their Consent (gizmodo.com)
Comcast has been embroiled in a legal battle since 2016 regarding potentially deceptive business practices surrounding its "Service Protection Plan" -- a $6 a month program which covered almost nothing. But as an amended complaint recently filed by the Washington state attorney general alleges, Comcast didn't just dupe customers, it may have signed them up for the plan without their knowledge. From a report: You might expect such a plan to, uh, protect the service a customer is paying for, by decreasing or eliminating the cost of repairs in the event something goes haywire. Not so! The fine print of the program excludes in-wall wiring and some outdoor wiring. This led the attorney general to conclude that the plan "simply covers the technician visiting the customer's house and declaring that the customer's equipment is broken."
Is that like the fire insurance that also protects your kneecaps, only sold by Big Uncle Vinny?
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this happens because call center reps are required to get a certain number of add on sales to keep their jobs. Even in rare instances where they're not the low pay means they need to push a number of these in the desperate hope they'll make enough money this month for rent _and_ food. It's a symptom of wealth inequality.
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The nice representative from Comcast also signed me up for Old Glory Robot Insurance. You never know when there's going to be another robot attack. They eat old people's medicine for fuel!
gizmodo was bought by univision after gawker went tits up
univision is owned by comcast
there is no disclaimer of this relationship on the article
Just get government off my back,( so that the corporations can stab me there without any impediment).
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
At just what fucking point does someone in the government start looking at Comcast though RICO eyes? It's not that far-fetched, and is not an unrealistic or unfair viewpoint.
Trump, you have a clown named Sessions. Do you have him doing anything useful? You know, something other than threatening to attempt to go after legal marijuana? Maybe you should tell the guy to deal with crime. You know, companies like Comcast. This shouldn't just be a matter of fines; you need to start arresting people who do things like in TFA and either they do the time, or they roll over on their bosses in exchange for immunity.
Jeff Sessions, stop being soft on crime.
1. Avoid doing business with Comcast ...
According to the FCC, they just need to be upfront about screwing you over, and then it's fine. They can't even do that right?
The AG’s office said that Comcast initially refused to provide recordings because it was “burdensome.” After the judge ordered Comcast to provide calls, the company deleted 90 percent of the samples the AG’s office had requested.
Sounds like some high up person at comcast needs to do some hardtime or at least go to criminal court over that.
For most if not all of the providers I've had over the years, there was a significant fee for the tech visit if the problem ended up being on your end, and that's true with Comcast as well. Looks like they're running around $70 per trip at the moment, and for $6 a month, that fee gets waived. So the break-even is about a year between visits. Depending on the condition of your internal wiring and your personal troubleshooting abilities, that may not be a bad deal.
Automatically signing people up is a different issue, but it seems a bit much to say that the program is "near-worthless."
If I come up with a newfangled name for a service and provide a 5 page contract that says in very convoluted terms the service doesn't do anything but because of my salesmanship I get you to buy it, is that illegal? Some kind of fraud?
Or is it just considered good salesmanship, and the fact that the sale was consensual and I didn't withhold any material facts make it A-OK?
I'm trying to think of a way that this could be made illegal, or at least greatly discourage companies from doing it. If you sue them for a refund and the judge/jury determine that the service was materially devoid of any value.
Their name needs to become an adjective , just like google became a verb. Maybe when their name literally translates to scummy customer service they will finally get a clue. Or at least have to pay the financial price to change their name and re-brand. Somehow they must be punished. .
or do you just do a CTRL-F on every /. article for 'wealth inequality' and throw out a rant?
This has _everything_ to do with wealth inequality. This is about the working poor (which 99% of call center employees are) being forced to do questionable and illegal things. Companies give employees unreasonable sales metrics and either threaten them with disciplinary action if they don't meet them and/or cut their pay to the point where it's impossible to survive without the meager bonuses. When the employees inevitably lie and cheat to survive the company blames the employees. Wells Fargo's mistake was doing it to such a scale that they couldn't use the 'bad actors' excuse, it was too pervasive in the company.
As a lawyer with a spouse who's also a lawyer you've probably never had to struggle to get by, or if you did it was so long ago you simply forgot what it's like. Push people hard enough and they're going to do bad things. Also, as a lawyer, essentially a member of the merchant class that aids the Aristocracy, you should pay careful attention to how far you push the working class. We had two World Wars when we pushed them too far, and with the exception of war profiteers they were not kind to the merchant class.
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Comcast has not ethics and its not surprising coming from Comcast. Have they ever taken any concern for their customers? Other then charging them all sorts of fee's for something to fill their coffers.
Everyone knows Comcast has the best customer service and is completely trustworthy, believe me!
AT&T did this to us. Investigate those fuckers.
Table-ized A.I.
was right.
Most of their service techs are subcontractors, at least in my area, and they don't know anything. I've had a "Comcast tech" to my house 3 times in about as many years and not once could I actually get this person to enter my house and look at anything because my net was back up and running at the time (usually several days before they arrived). It took my mom calling and leaning on her medical need for working internet to report her pacemaker results for them to fix the problem, which I always knew was at their end and not ours. Since that time, our downtimes have reduced by a drastic amount; I was keeping detailed logs of outages happening every day and they evaporated. Anyway, the point was that you shouldn't get a protection plan from them because they are likely going to scapegoat whoever they contract for services and you will be in court forever trying to prove that they have defaulted on their end of the deal..
One of my first jobs was developing call center software and I often had to go onsite to work on integration with their pbx (this was decades ago when integration was... interesting). Every single call center was a miserable place and I actually left the job because my work was contributing... managers were using the software to ensure staff were meeting their targets on average length of calls, number of calls answered per hour, time on hold, etc. To a man (and they were always men^H^H^H bros), the managers were jacka**es who made the worst used car salesmen look like a paragon of virtue. I had one who tried to insist that the system was not recording stats after I left in a bid to get me fired... why?... because I declined to go to a strip club with him after putting in 20+ hours fixing a problem caused by a major PBX upgrade they didn't even bother telling us about until I noticed the data feed had changed and called them on it. Thankfully the dumbass didn't know that we could remote into the systems for rudimentary diagnostics which clearly showed the stats updating just fine.
AT&T pulls the same crap forced customers to move to dual dsl they call unverse with a promise of no maintenance fee for their modem that only they supply the a monthly fee appears on your bill for the maintenance and they refuse to remove it big business runs the people that run the country so they get away with pretty much anything they want and since many areas have no real competition we are all screwed to use their service as without internet access you can't even sign up for healthcare so they should be regulated as a utility company
It just volcano insurance over and over across the whole page!