Man who thought he got free data downloads gets $18K phone bill

Verizon offered to reduce the bill by half, but Bob St. Germain, 66, rejected the offer after consulting with state utility officials who advised him not to pay. So Verizon sent the reduced bill to a collection agency. A 26-year-old son was responsible for the downloads that he thought were free. (Boston Globe)

Comments

[Joe]

Seriously, people can't use the "Fine Print" excuse on phone bills anymore. I have Verizon, and I have a smartphone with an unlimited data plan. I made damn sure I got one when I got the phone.

My contract was not printed on some 5 page packet of leagalese. No, it was on receipt paper that was about two feet long. Easy to read with "Unlimited Text and Data - $39.99" printed right on the bill. Yes, $18,000 is absurd, but when you sign a contract, you should make sure you know what you're doing. Assuming that you have something you didn't explicitly request is just plain stupid.

Yes they should reduce the charges, which they offered to do. But you seriously have to take responsibility for your own dumb ass actions. This guy does not have my sympathy, unlike the guy who who had Verizon confuse the difference between .02 dollars and .02 cents.

[Joe]

Holy crap, not only was he using the internet on his phone, he was Tethering it, which is explicitly against the terms of the contract anyway. They told me that when I got the phone. That's how he used all that data in a month. Morons, morons, morons. No sympathy.

[me2]

Don't feel sorry for this guy. I bet they knew what they were doing and are now using the excuse "we didn't know" to get out of paying.

Years ago I had the same problem. Thing is I had phone as modern and tethered my phone using an unlimited data plan. I changed my voice plan and the person also changed my data plan without my knowledge. My next bill was around $12000.00. They tried to have me pay it and issue credit. Of course I said no, and after 3 months, they took it off my bill.

[yomama]

greaaaaaaat....verizon offers to cut the idiot's bill in half...guess who gets to pick up the tab in the long run?...yeah, the verizon customers that aren't idiots.

[Sean J Jordan]

Here's the thing that bugs me. If the gentleman had been paying $30-40 a month for an "unlimited" data package, he would have not been socked with the bill. Likewise, if he'd been paying for their reduced data plan (which I think is $10 a month for a certain amount of data plus a per KB fee for each KB over that), the bill would have likely been in the hundreds, not thousands, of dollars.

Verizon can't argue that the COSTS of delivering data to a phone not on contract are substantial, because the reality is that their pricing does not reflect this. What they should do is offer to charge him the price he would have paid if he'd been a regular subscriber to the unlimited data service.

Instead, they want to absorb a bunch of bad PR and make a customer into a detractor because they're choosing to be rigid with their policy. Well done, Verizon Wireless.

[Bill]

No yomana, they don't pass the charges along. Businesses don't base prices on costs; they base them on market conditions.

If I have a boat load of widgets I need to sell, and everyone else in town is selling the same widgets at retail for 12 cents each. It doesn't matter whether I paid a penny each for them or a dollar each for them. the market price is 12 cents, and I will price them in that ballpark.

Now, one might go lower than 12, but if i went higher than the other widget sellers, i wouldn't sell them at all would I?

[SomeGuyInKC]

What Sean J Jordan said. Verizon should have something in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening. If unlimited data plans are available for $30.00 a month, then that is what they should have automatically switched him to that when his bill went beyond $30.00. Verizon and other companies have no problem with shutting off someone's service when they download what they consider to be an unreasonable volume for an unlimited plan, and they should have done the same here. It shouldn't be too difficult for an attorney to find other cases where this has occurred.

[Saxo Grammaticus]

"Telecommunications experts said it is difficult to know how much it actually costs Verizon to transmit data. Verizon and other wireless companies typically do not release that information."

Well, no kidding. That's because it costs them just about nothing. Zilch. Zero point sh*t. In their view, they aren't selling data transfer and don't want their services billed that way. Cell phones are a lousy way to transfer data. By selling "convenience" or "cool" or whatever, cell providers get to charge a lot for lousy service that costs them very little.

[Joe]

Saxo, actually, data transmission does cost quite a bit and tie up their network. That's why ATT's already crappy network took a nose dive when the iPhone came out and everyone started using the internet.

Text messages, on the other hand, do literally cost nothing. They're sent on the band that the cell phone uses to ping the tower, and that band is being pinged whether or not you're sending a text. So there's literally zero cost for a text message, and those things are nothing but profit.

But yes, there's no way the data cost $12,000 to transmit, but still, read your damn bill.

[Somebody]

Can I bill Verizon for the rights to the airwaves that the FCC sold off for pennies on the dollar? I think it's great the the State Utility officials told him not to pay the bill. F'em. Verizon can retroactively change his contract. Anyone who defends this bill is out of their minds and just a complete tool.

[Tom Weidermeijer]

Verizon should move them to an unlimited plan and charge them $250 or some number for the month that they son went nuts.

Then tell the son to get a friggin job and his own cell phone.

[Ernst Stavro Blofeld]

Big businesses love overage fees. They're pure gravy for them. "Oops, you stepped outside the artificially prescribed boundaries of your plan? BEND OVER."

If you're paying $40 a month for 500 minutes and you accidentally use 600, your bill should be increased to a sufficiently higher tier for one billing period. Boom. Done.

Same for your data plan. Same for SMS text messages. Your carrier should also give you the option to disable data and text messages if you're unwilling to pay more.

This is the honorable, ethical, and consumer-friendly way to do business, but it will never work this way because big companies love the additional revenue they derive from customer ignorance. FEES, FEES, FEES! Shareholders love them.

Joe, you're bananas. Yes, this family should pay for the extra data they consumed, but not $15 a megabyte! The Obscure Store clocks in at 350 kilobytes. Verizon would charge this family over $5 to look at one lousy web page. That is gouging, pure and simple.

[pregador27]

Verizon is a crappy company with even crappier customer service. When we went over on minutes they charged us a ton. They would not budge- not even a payment plan. Finally the contract ended and we went with AT&T. They have much better customer service. They will work with you and make the plan change retroactively. People complain about AT&T, but I find the service to be very reliable. Equal to Verizon in our area.

[Sigh]

If I read the article right, the plan was unlimited data the month before, but the promotional period ended, and 'poof' -- megabill.

How would he have known that those bits his son were downloading were THAT expensive. I think that Vagizen should have say, knocked it down to $500 and offered a plan that more matched his usage.

I find it a stretch to think that this guy was exploiting the system or was totally clueless. One month it was no extra charge, and the next, it was a Nissan Sentra.

[ModernTech]

So,.....Verizon sells an unlimited data plan for 30 bucks a month. Now as a regular joe who graduated kindergarten, that kinda tells me it costs verizon and any other cell phone company less than 30 bucks a month for the data transfer. Using the idea of the widget program from above, it doesn't matter how much the market can take for the merchandise because if the product costs more than the market will allow, the company just won't offer the product at all. If verizon and the others can sell it at 30 bucks then it costs far less than that to actually do the data transfers. These companies are here to make a profit and if it makes no money it won't be offered. Verizon should suck it up and drop the 18000 dollar bill for the 30 dollar service. The idiots at verizon apparently have no clue that the bad press on this will cost them far more than the 18k they will never see anyway.

[Hey!]

Keep up the good work Verizon, eventually you will give the gubmint an excuse to come up with some insane regulations that no one will be happy with.

[twerp]

Freakishly insane overage fees suck.