Local woman scammed by ‘cramming’
The day a U.S. senator presented a report about a practice known as cramming, a Fayette County woman was on NBC TV’s “Today” show to talk about how she fought to regain money for unauthorized charges tacked onto her monthly phone bill.
Cramming — the practice of third-party services billing customers for services they didn’t sign up for — cost Barbara Arnold of Uniontown around $300 over a year. The charges, she said, appeared on the latter pages of her Verizon bill for cellphone and home phone service.
The charges, for services such as voicemail access and a 1-800 number, were things Arnold said she never signed up for and only found out about when she tried to find a way to pare her increasing bill, when in the early months of 2010, her average $225 bill soared to more than $300.
“I told my husband, I can’t do this. I can’t pay $300 a month for a phone bill. We must be being too extravagant. We have to cut something out,” she said.
So said she called Verizon that April and said she was shocked when a representative told her she could reduce her bill by dropping some of her third-party services.
Arnold said she had never signed up for any, and asked Verizon to remove the charges. She said she was told that she would have to contact the companies directly to stop the services and also was told that she could protect herself from more third-party charges by putting a block on her line.
Two of the three services, which were about $15 each monthly, started in January 2010. The third, cost about $9 monthly and started in April 2009. One was for a voice mail account, a second was a personal 1-800 number. She said she’s still not sure what the third service was supposed to be.
When she called the companies providing the services, Arnold said she was told that she signed up for the services online and said she had to fight to get her money refunded, and eventually filed a complaint with the state Attorney General’s office.
In total, Arnold said she was out nearly $300 — all of which was eventually refunded by the companies, and credited to her Verizon bill.
In a statement, Verizon spokesman Bill Kula said that it’s impractical for the company to know what third-party services its customers order, but the company takes a customer’s word when they say they did not order a particular service.
“If a customer contacts us to say he or she didn’t authorize a charge, we revoke the fee per our policy and proactively offer our BillBlock service that allows customers to block unaffiliated third-party charges from their bills,” Kula said. “In related fashion, if a customer calls to ask about certain third-party charges not related to Verizon on his/her bill because they are not sure what the service is, they will be referred to the third-party service provider.”
Kula said Verizon processes more than 1 million bills with third-party charges, and cramming complaints represent less than 1 percent of those.
In Arnold’s case, Kula said that the third-party companies who were charging her bill all showed that she signed up for their services online, though Arnold said she never did.
Kula said the companies who were billing Arnold — Voice Mail Solutions, Agora Solution and 1800-321-CONTACT — are all in good standing with Verizon, and noted that they did refund her money.
It was Arnold’s complaint to the Pennsylvania authorities that led a representative from U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s office to call as part of his yearlong investigation into cramming. And last week, in advance of the report’s release, Arnold was interviewed on the “Today” show. The interview aired Wednesday.
“I didn’t do this for notoriety,” Arnold said. “It just infuriated me that this was happening.”
Rockefeller, D-W.Va., chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, released a 50-page report that found Americans could be paying as much as $2 billion yearly for unauthorized third-party charges on their home phone bills. The findings also showed that the nation’s largest telephone companies are profiting from the practice.
“This report is a stark picture of a billing system that is hurting consumers and making profits for phone companies,” Rockefeller said. “Despite industry promises to end this fraudulent practice years ago, hundreds of third-party billing companies have continued to place unauthorized mystery charges on consumers’ phone bills for services they do not want or use. In exchange, they reap tens of millions of dollars a year in profit.”
Rockefeller launched the investigation in May 2010 after years of complaints from consumers who were billed for third-party services for which they never registered.
The investigation found that telephone companies put about 300 million third-party charges on customers’ bills yearly, which totaled more than $2 billion in charges. Over a five-year period, there have been more than $10 billion third-party charges tolled to land line users. Of the 300 million third-party charges, the investigation found that the bulk of the them are unauthorized.
The investigation also found that over the past 10 years, telephone companies have made $1 billion in profits from cramming. For its part, Verizon acknowledged received between $1 and $2 for each third-party charge on a customer’s bill, the investigation noted.
“This fraud against millions of American consumers, businesses and even government agencies is utterly reprehensible. It’s time for us to take a new look at this problem and find a way to solve it once and for all,” Rockefeller said.
Arnold said she is glad that Rockefeller is trying to do something about the third-party billing practices.
“I never really thought it would go to this point. I just wanted our money back. But I’m glad there is someone out there like Sen. Rockefeller who looks out for that,” Arnold said. “Hopefully, something is done.”
If she could give advice to anyone in a similar situation, Arnold said she would encourage them to stick with it, be proactive and be aware of what they’re paying for.
“Be a vigilant consumer. One dollar here and one dollar there doesn’t seem like much, but when you’re doing it to 20,000 people, that’s a nice monthly income,” she said.