You might remember how during the summer, Teresa Dixon Murray at the Cleveland Plain Dealer did a great job highlighting a phantom $1.99 fee Verizon was hitting consumers with -- even if they didn't use any data. The phantom charges were being incurred when phones were off, phone batteries were dead, Internet access was blocked, or the phones didn't have the necessary software to go online. Many of you at the time complained about the fee as well. If you remember, Verizon told the paper that the charges were "erroneous" and that users would be getting full refunds.

Fast forward several months later, and David Pogue of the New York Times pens an article today exploring how users are still getting socked by the phantom fee. Pogue doesn't reference Murray's earlier investigation into the phantom fee, but he does take the story one step further by quoting a Verizon insider who claims Verizon's well aware of the scam, but refuses to do anything about it because of the millions in additional revenue it generates. Says the insider:You can of course have all data blocked. However, hitting one of these buttons by accident results in a message that the service is blocked -- a message that uses 0.06 kilobytes of data resulting in -- wait for it -- a $1.99 fee. The insider, who says he thinks there's millions of people obvlivious to this fee, says Verizon's now training support to try and offer customers blocking alternatives should they call and complain. Billing accuracy has never been Verizon's strong suit, be it wireless or landline service. With the frequency of the phantom charges imposed by the carrier, you begin to wonder how "erroneous" they really are.

Pogue recently brought a lot of attention to the fact that wireless carriers were using intentionally long voicemail greetings in order to erode user minutes. Hopefully his latest column can bring the same kind of attention to Verizon's cash cow $1.99 fee.