Outrageous Cell Phone Bills
Have you received yours yet? The all-time
worst cases and how to avoid those sneaky hidden fees.
Jim Higdon on January 17, 2008
There’s an old saying in newsrooms that people love stories
about puppies, and consequently, there tends to be more
puppy-related news than the adorable creatures might warrant. In
today’s news world, cell phone companies have become the opposite
of puppies: the thing upon which everyone can agree is that they are terrible.
In the last six months, the consumer-dissatisfied-with-cell-company
narrative has given birth to a new subgenre, the outrageous phone
bill story, which has become a full-grown news cliché.
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Since the introduction of the iPhone
and other mobile data-transmission platforms, a new dimension has
been added to consumer distrust of major mobile phone carriers.
With hidden passages buried in the legalese of their service
agreements, companies like AT&T
Wireless, Sprint,
Bell Canada and others have found ways to cheat unsuspecting
consumers out of offensive amounts of money.
The outrageous phone bill subgenre was born in July 2007 when
David
Pogue, technology columnist for The New York Times, received his first iPhone bill — which he
called “a staggeringly, hatefully complex document, designed by
some Monty Pythoneseque committee in charge of consumer
confusion.”
Pogue, who had signed up for the $60 plan, found his first bill
came to $150 with “unexplained services and features that were
never mentioned during the sign up process, like MEDIA MAX, EXPD
M2M, VOICE PRIVACY and AT&T DIRECT BILL.” Had AT&T charged
Pogue for “voice privacy” after handing over its entire network to
the NSA (National Security Agency) for government spying? That
seems rich, but it gets better.
Then there were the stories of giant iPhone bills that listed every text
message and data-transmission bit, line by line, resulting in
300-page bills. These stories started coming out in late summer,
but thanks to e-billing and some work by Apple Inc.,
they eventually disappeared. However, that was before iPhone users
went on vacation.
In September, a British news site reported that an iPhone user
had gone on a Mediterranean cruise and returned to England to find
a 54-page phone bill totaling $4,800. The iPhone didn’t know it was
cruising through foreign waters, so it was checking for new emails
every five minutes — even when the phone was off — racking up hefty
charges by the hour.
Coincidentally or not, The New York Times reported on the exact same
problem, on the exact same day. The article told the story of a San
Francisco man whose European vacation cost him an additional $852
because he didn’t deactivate the iPhone's automatic email-checker,
which looked for new messages more than 500 times on his trip
through Italy, Croatia and Malta.
Despite the rash of these sorts of stories, they seemed to have
missed the eye of WIRED magazine's Chris
Anderson, whose trip to China cost him $2,100 in iPhone
email-checking fees; this generated a bit of blogosphere schadenfreude since it illustrated
that even the most tech-savvy among us are vulnerable to these
sneaky fees.
At some point along the way, cell phone users who signed up for
“unlimited data” plans actually thought that “unlimited” meant
unlimited and began using their cell phones as modems to download
high-definition movies from Lime Wire, resulting in a $54,000 bill in England, an $85,000 bill in Canada and an American-life blogger who data-transmitted
herself into a $14,000 debt to Sprint.
The recipient of this debt, “Krystyl” — a bottle-blonde with
raccoon eyes — posted a video on YouTube to explain that she had
purchased the Sprint data card so she could broadcast herself on
Justin.tv “to
allow my viewers to see what I’m doing,” she said. When the card
didn’t work right, she cancelled the service, only to be slammed
three weeks later with a bill for $14,062.27. “Why?” she asked in
her video, “I don’t know.” To date, more than 37,000 YouTube
viewers have seen Krystyl's complaint, the bill itself (which she
assures us "is not fabricated, made up or [something I am] showing
to you as a joke”) and the return envelope.
So, how can you avoid ending up like Krystyl, without resorting to
an exclusively prepay-cell lifestyle? A few tips:
- If you plan on using a mobile data plan as your primary
Internet connection, check with your carrier first, especially if
you’re going to slurp bandwidth.
- Your carrier is not going to call you after you rack up $1,000
in download charges to warn you; you’re just going to get a bill at
the end of the month.
- When traveling with your iPhone, go to Settings, Mail, and set
the Auto-Check option to Manual. Then, only check it in a wifi hotspot to avoid
foreign cell-carrier fees.
- Knock off all that text
messaging.
- Visit
ConsumerSavvyTips.org for more help reducing your cell
budget.