Woman Faces $9,100 Verizon Bill For Data She Says She Didn't Use A Verizon wireless customer says she was hit with a $9,100 bill for hundreds of gigabytes she never consumed. The woman tells the Cleveland Plain Dealer she was on Verizon's 4 GB shared data plan, but suddenly faced a bill for $8,535 after Verizon said she consumed a whopping 569 gigabytes in a period of just a few days. When the user grew frustrated by the errant charges and fled to T-Mobile, Verizon charged her a $600 penalty.

quote: "I told them that I won't pay the bill,'' Gerbus said. "I can either wait until they take it to a collection agency or when they take it to court. Either way, my credit history will be ruined. I can go bankrupt here.'' Stories like this used to be a monthly occurrence for the wireless industry, which has dramatically improved errant billing of this type. A When she tried to use Verizon's portal to see what caused the usage spike, it informed her "the activity you are trying to perform is currently unavailable. Please try again later.'' Meanwhile, Verizon doesn't appear to have much of an explanation for the data spike (outside of claiming that she accessed Amazon some 400 times in one day), and the woman says she's simply unwilling to pay for data she didn't use:Stories like this used to be a monthly occurrence for the wireless industry, which has dramatically improved errant billing of this type. A report in 2012 found that wireless carriers dramatically and frequently (at least at that time) over-estimated subscriber usage and often over-billed their users, though not usually quite so dramatically.







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Most recommended from 73 comments



karlmarx

join:2006-09-18

Moscow, ID 29 recommendations karlmarx Member Symptom of the Culture of Greed This all starts from the TOP of a company. Like Wells Fargo, the pressure to provide GOOD numbers comes from a steadily declining quality of CEO's (or in other words, more sociopathic). Wells Fargo was pressuring FROM THE TOP to improve their numbers. Comcast/Verizon/AT&T/etc, ALL practice this messed up philosophy. Back in the 70's, the average CEO pay was only 25-35 times the average salary. But when Reagan promised 'Supply Side Economics' as the cure for the country, the average CEO pay has only gone up and up, now its 300 times the average salary. With the increase of salary/power is EXTREMELY attractive to sociopaths (just look at Trump). The pressure for the lowest level employee to 'show good numbers' to avoid being laid off is a direct result of those ideas. If you work for comcast/verizon/att/etc, your job DEPENDS on you having good numbers. Hint: You won't get a RAISE with satisfied customers anymore, you only get a raise with PROFITABLE consumers. There's a big difference, and even though I'm SURE there are some billing errors that favor the consumer, the vast majority do NOT, and the corporations have ZERO INCENTIVE to provide a 'satisfied' customer experience. This is the natural result of decades of republican's telling the big lie over and over that Supply Side economics work, and the majority of people have bought into it. We've reaped what we sowed, and it's not going to get better. mikesco8

join:2006-02-17

Southwick, MA 24 recommendations mikesco8 Member They better be able to come up with something better than... She accessed Amazon 400 times in one day. Unless she was watching prime video she could access Amazon web pages 400 times every day for the month and not use anywhere close to that amount of data. microphone

Premium Member

join:2009-04-29

Parkville, MD 11 recommendations microphone Premium Member It should not be possible for a consumer to run a cellphone bill this high With all the video ads playing on webpages and applications "phoning home", I find it unreasonable to be billing by the amount of data consumed.



While I understand some cell carriers and plans offer user controls to prevent this, a "catch-all" protection should have kicked in after $500.00 or something to prevent the bill from escalating further. Even with total user error $8,535 would be ridiculous. rody_44

Premium Member

join:2004-02-20

Quakertown, PA 2 edits 4 recommendations rody_44 Premium Member Brothers bill was 1600 My brother has one of them share plans and his bill was 1600. It was legit to. He has one 15 year old that went wild with it. I work with my brother who is the account holder. His phone was going nuts warning him. He would get a warning every 10 minutes or so. Then he got the bill. He checked usage per device. It was mainly one son going nuts playing games and downloading games and videos. Watched videos all day in school during class. He even went to sleep every night with his phone propped up next to him streaming video all night while he slept. Kid still has a phone today but my brother no longer ignores the warnings. When his phone goes nuts with warning he goes in and shuts data off for the one sons phone. He still gets crazy high bills but the offender is getting better.





JimThePCGuy

Formerly known as schja01.

MVM

join:2000-04-27

Morton Grove, IL 3 recommendations JimThePCGuy MVM Carrier notifications Verizon notifies you when you are about to exceed your data allotment.

Either Verizon did not send the messages or the customer ignored them.