TBZRSS
join:2010-06-03
Friendswood, TX | reply to wm2943
Sometimes it won't help to read your contract... You don't have to be a rocket scientist or a professional researcher to dig up TONS of historical data on how telcos have been screwing us for years. For Christ's sake, there are companies that will offer a service to dig through all of your phone bills (typically corporate) to find the inconsistencies in billing. They offer this service FREE OF CHARGE. They then make a request for a refund for all of the inappropriate charges and take a "cut" of those monies. Can you imagine, companies that could base their entire income stream on something like this? Believe it.
I was representing some independent resellers of telephone service during the deregulation of local phone service (see Telco Act of 1996) and saw some unbelievable stuff... For instance, we moved 300 phone lines from SWBT to Quest and SWBT took out 40% of Houston's ability to call these lines!!! This was later proven by multiple testimonies of SWBT techs. That my friend is the definition of Anti-Competitive behavior.
AT&T pulled a nasty on my wife and I. In 2003, we purchased 2 AT&T phones on a family plan. We shared our minutes from the same "minute bucket". They weren't supposed to bill us for talking with one another on these phones. However, they proceeded to bill us 2 minutes for every 1 minute of conversation between our phones. We sent in a request (via phone and email) for refunds of these instances EVERY MONTH! Guess what they told us....."Sorry about that. That shouldn't be happening. However, we don't have the ability to refund you the minutes that you all used while receiving these calls from each other. However, we'd be happy to refund you the minutes used from the phone originating the calls." So they could only refund the calling phone, not the receiving phone. We even have this in writing.....
We went to court and presented our case to the judge and won. We then sued them under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act which provides treble damages to the consumer if you were screwed.....we won...
So, I don't care how many times you read a contract, nothing can protect you from a giant that wants to screw you. It's like being in prison...only you don't have the option to NOT pick up the soap because living without a mobile phone is NOT an option. |
