Many months ago I wrote about a surprising charge that showed up on my Verizon phone bill from AT&T. It was a big surprise partly because I was not an AT&T long distance customer. The surprise was made even worse because when I called to ask for a refund on that charge AT&T took an opportunity to first make a series of really obnoxious pitches for me to switch to their service, and then went so far as to lie to me not once, but twice, about my long distance service from Verizon.
It turns out that A LOT of people found similar charges on their bills. 1,267,032 if Dow Jones are to be believed. There were a number of articles that speculated that AT&T made all of these “mistakes” on purpose to circumvent the Do Not Call list, which had just been launched. I don’t know if I give their billing operations that much credit, but conspiracy theories abound.
According to Dow Jones AT&T Corp. (T) will pay $500,000 to the FCC to settle the charges that the company erroneously billed certain AT&T and non-AT&T customers a $3.95 basic rate monthly recurring fee. My two issues with this are that what AT&T charged me was more than $3.95, and others reported similar in the press. Two, AT&T never did refund the erroneous charges on my bill, which I did need to pay because they were on my Verizon bill. AT&T promised a refund and it never came. So Im speculating that even with the size of this fee AT&T likely came away making money from this mistake or scam or whatever you want to call it. Thats just not right.
