Verizon to refund up to $90M in bogus data charges

Wonder how much of a refund/credit the average person is going to see.....

This may well be the largest consumer telecommunications refund in history. Verizon Wireless said Sunday it will pay up to $90 million in refunds to some 15 million subscribers who were charged for data usage or Internet access, though they weren't on data usage plans. The company will credit current customers who were billed for bogus data sessions between $2 and $6 each on their October and November bills. And it will cut checks in the same amounts to former customers.


Here's the statement from Verizon Wireless Deputy General Counsel Mary Coyne:

Verizon Wireless values our customer relationships and we always want to do the right thing for our customers.
In October and November, we are notifying about 15 million customers, through their regular bill messages, that we are applying credits to their accounts due to mistaken past data charges. We will mail former customers refund checks. In most cases, these credits are in the $2 to $6 range; some will receive larger credits or refunds.
As we reviewed customer accounts, we discovered that over the past several years approximately 15 million customers who did not have data plans were billed for data sessions on their phones that they did not initiate. These customers would normally have been billed at the standard rate of $1.99 per megabyte for any data they chose to access from their phones. The majority of the data sessions involved minor data exchanges caused by software built into their phones; others involved accessing the Web, which should not have incurred charges. We have addressed these issues to avoid unintended data charges in the future.

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DSL Reports offers additional insight:

For some time we’ve been tracking how Verizon has been socking customers with a $1.99 data access fee on many phones — which was incurred by users even if the phone was off or the battery was dead. Even users who had data access on their phones blocked were socked by the fee — given that the message sent to users to tell them they couldn’t get data consumed 0.06 kilobytes of data — resulting in a $1.99 data fee.
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At&T doing the same thing - been tacking on data charges to my bill, I call and complain almost every cycle. Yes these might be only a $2.00 charge or so but multiple that by a couple thousand customers and you got yourself a decent little profit for nothing.

Pulling the old AOL Tactics back out are they?

Yeah, I remember, this was a very blatant AOL Tactic back in the day of the Hourly On-Line charge.
Get connected for 5 mins and get booted off cost you $2.95. do that a couple times in a row and see how quick you tell a company like that to go f themselves. Then get hit with the monthly charge for an additional 2 months while you threaten them with law suits to cancel your account and quit charging your Credit Card only to have to call and cancel your credit card and get a new one to stop them from doing it.
Then maybe get a refund a few weeks later after they have collected as much interest off of your hostage held money as they could.

That, is, the, OLD AOL Tactic.

Heck, I say the customers tell them to keep the money and invest it in upgrading the system. What the heck is $2.00 going to do for my life? I have Verizon, I love Verizon, what company does not **** up every once in a while.