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AT&T Slaps Family With a $19,370 Cell Phone Bill
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Sep 06, 2008 04:38 PM
from the hearts-and-minds dept.
from the hearts-and-minds dept.
theodp writes "Mama, don't let your babies send e-mail and photos from Vancouver. A Portland family racked up nearly $20,000 in charges on their AT&T bill after their son headed north to Vancouver and used a laptop with an AirCard twenty-one times to send photos and e-mails back home. The family said they wished they would have received some kind of warning before receiving their chock-full-of-international-fees 200-page bill in the mail for $19,370. Guess they didn't read the fine print in that 'Stay connected whether you are traveling across town, the US, or the world' AT&T AirCard pitch. Hey, at least it wasn't $85,000."
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Apple? (Score:5, Informative)
And this is tagged "apple" why?
This is not about an iPhone just because it's about AT&T.
Perhaps some confusion about the brand Aircard (Score:5, Informative)
The branding "Aircard" is close enough to "Airport" some readers may assume it refers to Apple equipment instead of stuff manufactured by Sierra Wireless [sierrawireless.com].
Parent
Re:Apple? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Apple? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, you're not far wrong. By default the iPhone disables international data roaming, you have to explicitly tell it you want to use data when not on your home network.
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Re:Apple? (Score:5, Funny)
No, I expect him to wiggle his butt.
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Re:Apple? (Score:5, Funny)
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Oh Noes! (Score:4, Insightful)
I would think that in the interests of PR, AT&T might send you a text or something when you go international roaming and pass some threshold of use, just to warn you. But really, if you pay extra to call Canada long distance, don't you think your cell phone/data card would work the same way?
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Interesting)
I blame the fine print. They are so verbose that you could be agreeing to anything.
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Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Informative)
You _are_agreeing to anything - and everything. One of the contract terms in almost all contracts is that they can change the terms. Granted, they must notify you and they aren't allowed to charge ETFs if you cancel because of it. But you are not allowed to 'lock-in' services just because they 'lock-in' two years of service. In short, you can't hold them to their own contract so long as they 'notify' you.
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Re:Oh Noes! (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, but having to sign it in blood should have made them suspicious!
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Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
and it's that kind of attitude that popularized predatory lending practices which created the current mortgage crisis. similar systemic problems have also been observed in the credit card industry, with credit card companies intentionally targeting the most financially distraught members for higher credit ratings knowing that they won't be able to pay off their debts.
if you lend money to someone who you know can't pay you back or afford the interest rate, and then they file for bankruptcy as a result, why should anyone bail _you_ out when you're in financial trouble? in these cases it's not borrowers who are trying to convince lenders to approve loans they know they can't afford it. it's usually the other way around, where the lenders convince borrowers to take out loans that any conscionable lender should know not to approve.
most people who fall victim to these practices are first-time homeowners. they're not mortgage industry professionals who are familiar with lending contracts. so it is understandable that they can be misled to sign into a loan which they are unable to pay back. such excuses cannot be made for the lenders. they should be well versed in sound lending practices.
the deceptive use of fine print doesn't clear a business of responsibility for unethical business practices.
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Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
well, that's sorta like saying someone who's dumb enough to get conned/scammed deserves to be scammed. i certainly don't promote ignorance (in fact, i find the overwhelming level of ignorance in our society quite frustrating) but you can't support, or let businesses get away with, unethical predatory lending practices.
and let's be honest here, who has never missed/skipped over a few lines of fine print when signing some kind of business contract? whether it was through conscious choice or accidental, we've all skimmed over parts of contracts or legal forms to some degree. i mean, who has never misread a word or sentence while reading a book/newspaper/magazine/street sign/etc.?
the very nature of fine print is inherently deceptive. that is precisely why businesses use fine print to conceal warnings, disclaimers or terms/conditions which consumers may be put off by. you can call the use of fine print a marketing tactic to make your service/product look more appealing. and it's considered completely legal usually. but at some point this kind of manipulation of consumers crosses into overt dishonesty.
if you have a 20-page cellphone contract full of verbose wording for trivial details and standard terms of agreement, but buried near the back you have, in fine print, a special clause that requires the signee to hand over all his personal assets to you and surrender himself to disciplinary flogging if he uses his phone to make a business call on the sabbath, then this probably wouldn't be considered a legally-binding contract by any sane court.
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Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
So? Don't sign it...
If all the cell providers have basically the same contract, then there is no real choice. You're not dealing with a free market when providers collude to fix service agreements, you're dealing with a cartel. And as long as there are self-righteous apologists sticking up for the cell phone cartel, nothing is going to change.
AT&T runs commercials all the time advertising their accessibility in Europe and overseas. I don't remember anywhere in there hearing that charges could be as high as $20,000.00. If AT$T had to disclose that in a service contract, no one would sign up for their service.
It's time consumers stop being victimized by service contracts where one side reserves the right to change the terms at any time. That's not a contract, it's a hostage. And stop wagging fingers at consumer caught in silliness like this. These people could very well be facing financial ruin.
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Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
So? If they are it's their own fault. They claimed that they both read and understood all the nuances of the contract when they accepted it. They have no excuse for being surprised by the financial repercussions.
Should people be free to enter in to ANY kind of contract? Suppose the contract stated that if you didn't pay your bill on time you would become indentured to the phone company until such time as you paid the bill? If you're in really hard straits should you be able to sell yourself into slavery?
Boilerplate contracts are generally enforcable, but courts have discretion to determine the fairness of any such contract. This is for good reason - they don't represent a meeting of the minds, but rather a deal in which one side has far more bargaining power than the other. When every phone provider in the country has onerous terms your only option is to not own a phone.
Go ahead and try to live without a credit card, phone, cell phone, internet, or anything else that requires signing a boilerplate contract with one-sided terms. Sure, you can still live that way, but why would you want to? You can't even go to the hospital without signing a boilerplate contract. In some cases you can be treated as if you had implied consent to a contract if you were treated while unable to make decisions.
Look - I'm fairly libertarian - more so than most. However, consumer protection laws are very necessary in this day and age when just about every cost-effective industry is an oligopoly.
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Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Interesting)
I travel extensively for my work, and have regularly hit my "credit cap", which I believe is around the £600 mark. This normally entails paying the bill two or three times a month over the phone to keep outbound service (and GPRS - when I am switched to incoming only, my service is restricted to GSM, so mail stops coming to my BlackBerry).
I have had bills of £2000-£3000/month before, but this was astronomical and wholly unexpected. It turns out that it was almost all data usage (about £350/day), and it was the GPS application on my BlackBerry (8800) downloading map data on the fly. The BlackBerry GPS app and Google Maps do not cache maps on your handheld, and will run in the background if merely "exited" as opposed to "closed", so beware!
My response was to ask why my "credit cap" hadn't kicked in, and the explanation offered was that partner networks do not provide daily updates on roaming data use, instead providing weekly or monthly totals - i.e. T-Mobile didn't know how much I had run up until the end of the month.
I stated my position clearly - that I would not pay, I would attend a court if they attempted to force me to pay, I would not retain a lawyer and the entirety of my defence would be: "They want £10,000 for one months service".
I explained that I would, if pushed, demonstrate that these were disproportionate charges, and the repercussions of bringing such a case against me could be severe.
I displayed my intent by emailing recordings of my conversations with customer reps to Jim Hyde, the MD of T-Mobile UK, which included such gems as "Well you are entitled to a discount on data within the EU, but that obviously doesn't include Brussels."
We settled for £3,500.
I then made it my business to find a contract which includes unlimited international data.
Not one of the UK networks will offer this in a consumer tariff, and in the end it was only O2 who said to me: "Oh you can add that as a "Bolt-On" to any business contract for £20/month.
No other company offers anything like unlimited roaming data, and I was shocked at how cheap it was to do. It has slashed my bills by literally thousands of pounds, to say nothing of the savings on hotel and airport internet.
As an aside, O2 is the UK partner network for the iPhone - but there is no iPhone "business" tariff that will allow you to bolt on international roaming as I have done with the BlackBerry. Not too troubling until they provide above-board tethering anyway.
And as a final note, will somebody please sort out the £ sign when posting from the AJAX box!
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Read Contracts & Limits aren't carriers want (Score:5, Insightful)
You charged me exactly what it said in the contract I signed said you would! How dare you.
I expect that in a world where most either read their contracts in great detail (and are sufficiently educated to understand the ramifications) or refused to sign anything that took them more than a minute to read, this would work out great. I'm not sure which plan you're advocating, though, and I expect either plan would actually impede carrier sales.
I would think that in the interests of PR, AT&T might send you a text or something when you go international roaming and pass some threshold of use, just to warn you. But really, if you pay extra to call Canada long distance, don't you think your cell phone/data card would work the same way?
I think the particularly telling piece of information is that if you want a plan where they do limit your charges and notify you when you reach thresholds.... you have to pay extra. They're called prepaid plans, and there are no surprises (well, within limits), but for common use cases, it's guaranteed you'll pay 2-4 times the amount a customer on a given rate plan will.
Why the cell phone companies can't combine the limits on prepaid plans with conventional rate plans is an interesting question, but I suspect the answer is not a technical limitation.
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Re:Read Contracts & Limits aren't carriers wan (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought cell phones ran credit checks... don't customers have a credit limit like a credit card would have? Why are the telcos allowing such huge overages over what plan you are credit approved for? They know your credit score and reasonable limit,why are they not following that on these cell plans?
This is like the old-school days when mechanics would have you sign to "fix" your car, then replace the parts with 10x what they costed and huge labor costs then not let you have your car back... in response we passed law saying they had to tell you charges BEFORE work started and return the used parts. Expecting telcos to honor the credit checks they perform should be expected as ethical behavior.
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Incentive to limit profit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. It is definitely not a technical limitation, but designed to enhance profits.
I am always irked when I travel to a new city, spend $60 on my VISA card, and am called 5 minutes later for a "fraud alert" early warning. Or, better yet, dine in a restaurant in another city and have it "declined for my safety" due to unusual activity.
For any of you guys saying "Oh, this is good," remember this is designed to protect the Credit Card company, not you. Almost all cards limit your responsibility to $50 for fraudulent transactions. You can rest assured if you were responsible for your own well being, as in the case outlined, you would not get an early warning. Similarly, there is no financial incentive to do so in the case of AT&T above, who can now harass the customer to pay a huge amount of money, and then look "generous" to let them off with only a couple of hundred dollars in fees.
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Re:Oh Noes! (Score:4, Interesting)
Roaming is something of a scandal over here in the EU, where we pay astonishing fees to use our phones a couple of hundred miles away with the same company we're signed on to at home. The European Commission has acted against roaming charges before now. [bbc.co.uk]
In a similar case recently, a woman was charged £4900(c. US$10000 at the time) by Vodafone because she used a 3g internet connection to watch the Apprentice on iPlayer from France. Vodafone waived the charges in the end.
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Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
What planet are are you from? One where it really is OK to charge 6 months wages to send email using a system in use by millions of people.
Its a sign the markets aren't competitive, the corporations immoral and some individuals so brainwashed that they blame the victim.
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Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Interesting)
The funny thing is that the guy was in Vancouver, so he was using Rogers. Rogers charges Americans roaming in Canada LESS for data than they charge Canadians who are not roaming.
The bill would have been MUCH higher if he lived in Vancouver.
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Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering I have ATT, I travel internationally, I use data to work using VOIP and RDP over VPN when I do so and have never had a bill from them exceeding $300, yeah, I find this pretty fucking ridiculous.
It is reasonable to expect charges in Canada to be roughly the same as roaming agreements for many years have included Canada as a basic service. Yeah, it's AT&T's fault if they weren't told they needed that for CANADA when they TOLD THEM THEY WERE GOING THERE.
I can see charging, double, triple, even ten times as much barring that petty nickle-dime $14 (or whatever the hell it is these days) service fee for included international roaming, but 32,200% more? I'd say that's a tad out of line because you know full well AT&T is buying that airtime in bulk and sure as shit isn't remitting more than about a couple ten bucks of that $19,320 to fucking Rogers.
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Disgusted (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people here will undoubtedly react in this topic, saying that this family "brought it onto themselves" or "should have read this or that".
I'm saying I'm disgusted, utterly disgusted how these companies treat their customers. Why isn't there a procedure in place that calls the customer upon reaching some limit like $500 or $1000 and warns them?
Why not? I'll tell you why. Because this is how the world works. But I'm still disgusted.
Re:Disgusted (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd warn a lot earlier. Like when you're 50% over your plan.
Contract or not, this isn't a business game, it's a game of gotcha with customers.
Lure people in with words like "unlimited," "free," "included" and then trickily word an overly verbose contract to make exceptions for everything.
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Re:Disgusted (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't even a matter of clauses buried in fine print. The problem is that this is "standard practice" and it is anti-consumer. Even if the first line in the agreement was 48 point and said "note that when you use your phone internationally you could end up being assessed charges far in excess of normal" it wouldn't be fair. It should simply not be possible to use a phone in a way that could run up that kind of a bill. If nothing else phone providers should be required to allow their customers to set a monthly limit on their spending - if the provider somehow lets the consumer go over the limit without express consent from the account owner they end up eating the cost.
And I don't want to hear about how roaming billing cycles are too slow to allow that kind of realtime assessment of charges. If they can route a 32kbps digital phone call from my home to a point halfway around the world such that it only takes 2 seconds for the phone to start ringing and there are no gaps in the audio, then they can send a 10-byte estimate of the cost of the call per minute and do a database lookup.
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Re:Disgusted (Score:5, Insightful)
Nevermind the whole "treat them like a 2 year old" nonsense.
How about being on the lookout for apparent fraud patterns?
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See: my bank. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've had calls from my bank's fraud department when they see a spike in, say, clothing purchases at department stores -- because I hardly EVER do that.
If they can call me because charges amounting to less than 10% of what flies in and out of my account roll through over a weekend -- not just because of how much, but because of /where/ -- AT&T sure as hell could flag an account that is fast approaching 50 times normal usage in the space of 24 hours.
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Re:Disgusted (Score:5, Insightful)
How does placing a cap in at, say, $500 worth of charges count as babysitting?
Who the hell actually WANTS to pay $500 worth of charges without knowing it?!
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Re:Disgusted (Score:5, Insightful)
it's called a credit limit... they have those on credit cards for a long time and they are heavily policed for fraud. If a bank allowed this they'd be looking at massive SEC and banking fines for such reckless credit behavior.
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Real responsibility is more than watch-out-for-#1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because everyone needs to be treated like a two year-old. No, we can't expect people to act like adults and be responsible for their own actions.
Real grown-up responsibility has more than a watch-out-for-yourself component. There's both an individual and a social component.
And a reasonably convincing case to be made that among others, most cell carriers don't take enough responsibility in helping people signing contracts understand the whole thing. Or that a reasonable person would find it highly surprising there are corners of the covered terms of service which if you wander into can subject you to fees 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than your conventional bill.
Think about it this way: when the people in question got the data service, do you really think they *never* asked what the service cost? It's highly unlikely. What is highly likely is that they asked, got the standard answer about the most common usage, and were simply not informed about the additional usage fees. They took an incomplete answer as a complete one.
You can argue that the contract is a complete answer, but here we have a problem: contracts are not intended to be effective vehicles for communicating terms of agreement to consumers, they're designed to be effective vehicles for specifying terms to the legal machinery. If you want to argue that the contract is the answer, you may as well argue the source code of a piece of software serves as a FAQ or Manual.
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Re:Disgusted (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think giving someone notice once their monthly phone bill is approaching $1000 due to a handful of glorified roaming charges is "treating them like a two-year old".
Rational people aren't going to think that sending an email is going to cost them thousands of dollar just because they're out of the country. It's email, for crying out loud.
Imagine getting a receipt at a restaurant for thousands of dollars due to a few tea refills. If you're ordering some sort of special tea that costs that much, you'd expect someone to tell you, right? Would you accept it if they pointed to some fine print at the bottom of the back of the menu?
Now, from the article:
It looks like AT&T is going to be sensible about this. That's a good thing. Remember how people kill people, and sometimes themselves? Getting fine-printed into thousands of dollars of debt is one of the things that can cause that. They'll probably kick it down to something the family is actually able to pay without selling their house or draining their kids' college funds.
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All too common tale (Score:5, Insightful)
This sort of thing has been going on for decades with cell phones and roaming. It is all too easy to get hosed by unexpected charges. They really should be forced to inform you anytime the fees on a call will exceed 10 times your normal per minute fee BEFORE connecting the call or in this case Internet connection.
Re:All too common tale (Score:5, Informative)
In the European Union, thanks to Commission intervention, mobile firms *have* to text you to inform you of rates whenever you arrive in a new state.
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Re:All too common tale (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. My gf just went to india, germany, and russia and texted and called me without tell AT&T anything.
This is another customer 'gotcha.'
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Re:All too common tale (Score:4, Informative)
International roaming is a feature you have to call and add to the account, they make you aware of the fees, and try to sell you a package that will reduce themm and when you do not buy it, they note it.
That wasn't my experience with AT&T. I used them from 2001 to 2004. I live in the US, and I was able to freely use my cell phone in Canada, and accrue roaming charges, without having to call and authorize anything. I had one of their national plans, so I was never charged roaming charges in the US, Canada was a different story.
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Too bad.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Too bad that our FCC does NOT require reasonable access and reasonable charges on OUR public airwaves.
Instead, the FCC whores out our frequencies for billions of dollars, and we then get re-charged for using those frequencies. What a crock of shit.
Question: How much did the roaming agreement with that "roaming carrier" cost AT&T? 10$? 100$? ... Free (peering agreement)?
AT&T's getting more clueful. (Score:4, Funny)
The iPhone, at least, has a "Disable Data Roaming" option... of course, they probably had that clue shoved down their throats by Apple. :)
Re:AT&T's getting more clueful. (Score:5, Informative)
The iPhone, at least, has a "Disable Data Roaming" option... of course, they probably had that clue shoved down their throats by Apple. :)
Ummm, no. The first iphone had international data roaming turned on by default. And since the iphone never really turns off, many suckers ran up large bills when traveling internationally since the iphone doesn't have push email and checks every 5 minutes or so, which results in a large data bill even if you don't send or receive a single email.
The second iphone has international data roaming disabled by default.
Parent
And people wonder why my family doesn't go back. (Score:4, Interesting)
My family was one of the many caught up in the original AT&T / Cingular Merger, and promptly quit them after we found out we couldn't add my little brother onto our current (read: old AT&T) cell plan (which was $20 per phone per month) unless the entire family got whole new phones and went on a new two-year contract.
Well, we did... with T-mobile.
Fast forward to now and almost the entire family has upgraded their phones since -- only one person at a time as opposed to en masse -- and my sister and I are happy as clams with Sidekicks, and even when I traveled to Canada, it never got nuts like this. (In fact, the one thing my boyfriend likes about T-mobile is that when he was traipsing all over Europe, you couldn't swing a charge cable around without hitting a T-mobile tower, so be enjoyed as-good-as-home data service!)
So... yeah, not surprised.
That's why prepaid plans are so crippled in US (Score:4, Interesting)
unconscionable contracts are unenforceable (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't there a common law rule about contracts that "unconscionable" clauses are not enforceable? There is no way a sane person would agree to purchase services at these prices or anticipate this level of charges. It's like ordering "a bottle of red" at The Olive Garden and getting a rare 1940 barolo priced at $20,000.
AT & T is really SBC, in management quality. (Score:4, Interesting)
Those interested in how that happened can watch Stephen Colbert explain in a 1 minute 14 second video: The New AT&T [google.com].
It seems to me ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Here are some typical charges at $0.019/KB
1 email would cost about $0.02 to send or receive
1 web page would cost about $0.20 to