Always double check your phone bills.
Over 15 million Verizon customers have been charged fees for data access they in fact never requested and could not even use.
Consumers $0. Verizon $90 million.
Individually the charges amount to less than $10 per customer, but the windfall for Verizon was nearly one hundred million. Not bad for ignoring a glitch and providing no service at all. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported today that Verizon Wireless will repay its customers up to $90 million to compensate for these wrongful charges. The refund will be one of the largest consumer refunds by a telecommunications company in history.
According to the Times and other news sources (click here for the information week article) Verizon’s misconduct has been ongoing for years. Since at least 2007, customers were charged data access fees relating to data delivered to mobile devices. Verizon claims to have fixed the problem.
Tom Allibone, former advisor to the FCC’s Consumer Advisory Committee and current Director of Audits for Teletruth, a consumer advocacy group based in New York City, claims that phone companies can rarely explain all of the charges on a bill. Most of the time, if a customer calls with a concern about a small fee or charge, the service representative will simply defer to a default answer: “That is a regulatory fee, something the regulators make us charge.” Many times this explanation is simply untrue. For this reason: always check your phone bill and ask questions!
Hopefully this refund will serve as a reminder to both consumers and telecom companies.
To Consumers: Though we wish the world were different, we have a responsibility to check our bills for accuracy, and when problematic, dispute or question any strange charges. Whether intentionally or by an honest mistake, consumers are regularly overcharged for services they do not use. In this Verizon case, no individual consumer has lost more than a few dollars, but the diminutive nature of the damages does not diminish Verizon’s culpability and lack of candor with its own customers.
To Companies: This type of conduct is unacceptable and consumers are on the watch. Thanks to new whistleblower provisions greatly increasing a consumer’s ability to monitor big corporations, misconduct both large and small will be reported and penalties enforced. Your duties to honestly provide service and bill customers are becoming less of an option day by day. And don’t wait till you are caught. Act swiftly and preemptively.
The FCC is Taking Action
We applaud FCC for its action seeking to impose penalties on Verizon for allowing these charges to continue, even after Verizon first detected the problem as early as 2007. In order to protect consumers from corporate misconduct, the FCC must punish all violations, especially when the effect on consumers is so small in comparison to the potential benefit for the companies like Verizon. Severe punishment is the only way to ensure that this does not become a regular problem for consumers.
Assisted by Zach Kady