Verizon Hits Florida Mom With $9,100 In Overage Charges

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I'm just going to come right out and say it, there is no way on this planet that 570GB of data should cost you $9,000 in overage charges. I don't care what anyone says, there is no reason to charge anyone that kind of money for data. Sadly, Verizon still hasn't explained to this lady how or why her bill is sky high.


The $9,100 Verizon cellphone bill staggered and stumped Valarie Gerbus, causing a financial hit that could destroy her credit. For months, the mother of two from suburban Tampa paid $118 a month for her cellphone package that included 4 gigabytes of data, which she says she never exceeded. That changed last month when Verizon charged her with using an eye-gouging 569 gigabytes for a whopping $8,535.
 
I have Verizon. If I even come close to going over my data limit I get bombarded with text messages and emails. There is a digital paper trail if she in fact used that data. If not, then Verizon has some explaining to do.
 
Obviously it was the Russians. They snuck in, hacked verizons network, and went to town on her account.

Seriously though, all these stories showing up at almost the same time verizon suddenly does away with overage because they now have the "safety net" option on their new plans. Almost like they have an idea something is wrong with their data monitoring software so are trying to cover it up with a new free feature.
 
how the hell does anybody use 570GB of data on a cellphone?!

"not knowing" is NOT a valid defense. There's many ways for users to monitor their data usage and set limits.
 
how the hell does anybody use 570GB of data on a cellphone?!

"not knowing" is NOT a valid defense. There's many ways for users to monitor their data usage and set limits.

Totally disagree with this. If they're going to charge me more than $9,000 for the month then the proof needs to be on them to let me know how I used all that. I suspect something very, very wrong with the meter.
 
That changed in July. She said she was scheduled to go to a wedding that was out of town and feared there would not be Wi-Fi on the trip. She said she often had plenty of unused data, and she didn't think of needing more.

On July 21, Verizon sent her a text, notifying her that she had used nearly all of her 4 gigabytes of data. The text said she could get 4 more gigabytes for $20. Realizing that she had two weeks before the end of the month, Gerbus bought the additional data.

Within an hour of the purchase, she received another text that told her she only had 10 percent left on the data that she had just purchased. The next text message she received said she could change her plan to 8 gigabytes for an additional $20 a month. She said she bought that upgrade to ensure she didn't have any data overages.

In a span of several hours, she estimates that she received 40 to 50 texts saying that she needed to purchase more data. She turned the notification off, believing that there had been a glitch in Verizon's system.

Gerbus said she realizes now that she should have contacted the company at that point, but she didn't, as she feared being placed on hold by a customer service representative.

She later went to work and planned on paying the bill online. When she found her online statement, it said she owed $6,480 for using 490 gigabytes of data. She was shocked.

Wedding, no Wi-Fi, so was tethering and uploading a large chunk of raw images or something? I could easily hit those numbers if I tried, but not without knowing it.

Of course there is the actual data transfer issue too... At 10mbit/s which is pretty standard (and sometimes optimistic) rural speeds, 500GB would take 5 days of 24/7 downloading/uploading. At a faster 40 megabit, it will still take well over a day of constant maximum usage (your phone would definitely have to be sitting on a charger...).

I don't know I'd like to see a usage chart per day over the month...
 
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Reminds me of the 80s and 90s, when long distance would cost 60cents a minute or more. So we have to wait 20 years or so before data on a cellphone comes down?
 
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't 95% of these "OMG, look at this huge power/water/phone/internet bill" stories resolved as just a stupid billing error?
 
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't 95% of these "OMG, look at this huge power/water/phone/internet bill" stories resolved as just a stupid billing error?

Usually and could easily be resolved with contact to customer service. But in the event it isn't I can see why people go to the media, it helps force their hand.
 
Usually and could easily be resolved with contact to customer service. But in the event it isn't I can see why people go to the media, it helps force their hand.

I mean, I've had some shitty customer service experiences before, but I'm imagine something like this would be resolved by talking to a manager or something. I have to wonder if this lady just called the media first. From reading the article, she cancelled her account immediately, which might be why they're stiff-arming her. Either that or we're only hearing her side of the story and the truth is something completely different.
 
I mean, I've had some shitty customer service experiences before, but I'm imagine something like this would be resolved by talking to a manager or something. I have to wonder if this lady just called the media first. From reading the article, she cancelled her account immediately, which might be why they're stiff-arming her. Either that or we're only hearing her side of the story and the truth is something completely different.

You've never dealt with Verizon before, have you?

My dad was seeing erroneous data over charges on his cell phone month after month, so he swapped to a different carrier (ported his #). He called and cancelled Verizon and they're still billing him to this day. It's at the point his attorney is about to get involved.

Chances are she called and got the run around after a 45minute hold time and then was probably told by a supervisor that it's accurate and she needs to make payment.
 
This crap is ridiculous. We need a law that treats this stuff like credit card debt; she should be able to file a fraud report and have the charges removed or reduced to something like $50.
 
Reminds me of the 80s and 90s, when long distance would cost 60cents a minute or more. So we have to wait 20 years or so before data on a cellphone comes down?

I loved those days. When they were advertising 20 cents a minute. Then 10 cents a minute. Fucking outrageous when you think about it.

I think with voice, it was easy to drop the per minute charges. From companies acquiring each other and merging to fiber lines. When you have the infrastructure there, you're good. With data, there are constant improvements to increase speed and reliability. So, it's never really fully paid for.

Where I work, we have old ADTRAN stuff from the early 80's for the phone stuff. We have a single guy in the PNW that knows the stuff at CenturyLink. They have to call him when they need to fix it. He knows how to test and how to fix or replace the things. The other guys come in and say that the stuff is from before their time.

But Verizon is cool and sends me notices when I hit 75%, 90%, 100% of my data amount. Shouldn't have a limit, but it is what it is. I've bitched. Others have bitched. It's extremely profitable, so it's not going to change for the sake of making the consumer happy.
 
. Shouldn't have a limit, but it is what it is. I've bitched. Others have bitched. It's extremely profitable, so it's not going to change for the sake of making the consumer happy.


Ding! Ding! Correct answer goes to Ur_Mom!
 
I thought if you went over, it gave you an option to buy additional.. if I didn't buy additional according to this article it just charges me??
I thought that went against FCC regs on overages? (just ASSUMING the agree'd cause they didn't respond)
 
You've never dealt with Verizon before, have you?

My dad was seeing erroneous data over charges on his cell phone month after month, so he swapped to a different carrier (ported his #). He called and cancelled Verizon and they're still billing him to this day. It's at the point his attorney is about to get involved.

Chances are she called and got the run around after a 45minute hold time and then was probably told by a supervisor that it's accurate and she needs to make payment.

I've only had to deal with them a few times over the past year, and they've been pretty reasonable when I talked to them. I know everyone has a different experience though. I don't like to jump on the bandwagon of immediately assuming the telco involved is evil incarnate. It's most likely a simple technical glitch that may be compounded by a stupid front line customer service rep. In the article it mentioned this lady was getting data overage warnings left and right. She signed up for more data and more data via text, but she never once called Verizon to ask WTF until she got the bill.
 
I've never had issues like this with Verizon. Only billing issue I have had with them is them messing up billing after we paid off a cell phone.

Last big problem was when ATT went together with Cingular. They tried to double charge me. That got resolved pretty easily.

Before that, the worst problem I ever had was with ATT. When I called to up my family plan minutes, they took off the (free calls to other ATT numbers) "feature".

It literally took me over 3 months to get them to fix that. Last time I called, I told them I would stay on the line until it was fixed. After I said that, it was fixed within 5 minutes.

And that was only for about a $300 over charge because they screwed up.

I literally wasted about 5-6 hours on the phone with them because they kept not fixing it.

I will NEVER EVER use ATT for ANY service ever again.
 
Knowing how it works on the backend, I give this a 99.999% chance of being "valid" usage in that the phone/device actually used the data and it was not a billing error. Now if it was an error in an app or frodulant is another question.



Also on Unlimited data. Data caps exist to get you onto WiFi. The RF at the towers is a limited resource and if you are on WiFi you are not using the network RF. The RF on cellular is much more akin to a dedicated fiber/T1 line than it your cable modem. The resource has to be shared or the price would be much more than it is today.
 
I thought all carriers instituted data throttling. Verizon just lets you fly at 4G speeds indefinitely?
 
Wow, I wish mine was that low. I had 3 bills that totaled $27, 500. A 10K, 7K and 4K in 3 consecutive months. Lucky they dropped them all. :)
 
Obviously it was the Russians. They snuck in, hacked verizons network, and went to town on her account.

Seriously though, all these stories showing up at almost the same time verizon suddenly does away with overage because they now have the "safety net" option on their new plans. Almost like they have an idea something is wrong with their data monitoring software so are trying to cover it up with a new free feature.

Safety mode is optional, you have to turn it on before you go over. And VZW was being dicks about charging extra for it initially on the lower tiers. After the public outcry they dropped the extra charges for the lower tiers.

If VZW really wants to be progressive they would implement a billing cap where it disables data after user configurable upper dollar limit. It would totally eliminate these ridiculous bills in press, but they would probably take a hit on the profits so I doubt they would do.

I get her fear of being placed on hold. Had a friend stay on phone call with VZW for 8 something hours once getting the run around. Obviously that's an out-lier case and they did end up compensating and fixing the problem for the time lost.
 
The lady admitted that when this started, she avoided calling support because she was afraid of long hold times. So some of the blame falls to her for continuing to purchase more data when she knew something was wrong. Rogue app on the phone? OS update gone very wrong? Kids got their hands on the phone? Now Verizon needs to produce logs showing when the data was used and what sites were party to the usage. They should have that data since they are known for tracking user's usages for "an enhanced customer experience" And $600 to cancel a plan seems a mite excessive unless a phone was included as part of the plan.
 
If you agree to a contract that states you will pay for overages, then you ignore warning that you are over your limit. Even if the amount if fucking insane and doesn't seem valid you agreed to those charges. Therefor it makes sense that you would pay for those charges. You don't order the most expensive item in a restaurant then after you eat it and get the bill tell them that you only think that it should have cost X amount and that you aren't paying whatever the menu states as that price is higher than you think it should be.

how the hell does anybody use 570GB of data on a cellphone?!

"not knowing" is NOT a valid defense. There's many ways for users to monitor their data usage and set limits.

Actually, in general it wouldn't be that hard. We have had a few customers drop our DSL service as they don't want a home phone and already have cell phones so have decided to just use their cell phones to tether devices or they get the small in home device that some carriers have to let you get a Wi-Fi access point that is feed off of a cell signal. So start using your cell phone for all internet traffic in your home and had multiple people using their cell phones away from the house, hitting 500+GB would be very easy.

Wedding, no Wi-Fi, so was tethering and uploading a large chunk of raw images or something? I could easily hit those numbers if I tried, but not without knowing it.

Of course there is the actual data transfer issue too... At 10mbit/s which is pretty standard (and sometimes optimistic) rural speeds, 500GB would take 5 days of 24/7 downloading/uploading. At a faster 40 megabit, it will still take well over a day of constant maximum usage (your phone would definitely have to be sitting on a charger...).

I don't know I'd like to see a usage chart per day over the month...

True, but it also didn't all happen in the course of a single day either. This was done over a week and a half. You quoted some of the article which means that you did read it (or part of it at least). "A tech support employee for Verizon told her that her phone had hit on Amazon more than 400 times in a span of days, she said. On Aug. 1, she begged a customer service representative to avoid turning her phone off, as she needed it for her job and for her children to reach her. The company said she had used 490 gigabytes of data since July 21. The next day, the company turned off her phone, claiming her usage had jumped to 569 gigabytes."

So that 569 is over the course of 11 days. Given that they are seeing it hitting Amazon over and over it could be that she started to stream something from that app and it got stuck running in the background constantly downloading stuff still. I have had Netflix screw up a few times and keep a non stop connection of 25Mbps going to my house even though I have no device actively playing Netflix movies at that point in time.

I also wouldn't exactly say she didn't know this was happening, she kept getting the alerts that she was over and decided to just keep ignoring all 50 of them before turning off the warning about being over because she didn't want to keep getting alerts.
 
Once the bill doubles, *data* service needs to be cut and confirmed, or severely slash the speed into the free zone. It should not be legal to get from $118 to $9100 without being contacted for a price confirm and estimate. Other businesses aren't allowed to do this.
 
Once the bill doubles, *data* service needs to be cut and confirmed, or severely slash the speed into the free zone. It should not be legal to get from $118 to $9100 without being contacted for a price confirm and estimate. Other businesses aren't allowed to do this.

The issue with your statement is that they did contact her, over 50 times. She agreed to pay for the overage and even changed her package early on. Saying that she assumed the messages were all lies doesn't change that they kept contacting her about this.

The consumer has to have some responsibility for their actions. If you turn on every light in your house, and turn the AC down to 40 degrees they power company isn't going to call you and say that you are using a lot of power and cut you off because you are using a lot. If you turn on every water faucet in your house the water company isn't going to call you.
 
that's just nuts she used almost 80GB in one day? No, not likely

article said:
tech support employee for Verizon told her that her phone had hit on Amazon more than 400 times in a span of days, she said. On Aug. 1, she begged a customer service representative to avoid turning her phone off, as she needed it for her job and for her children to reach her. The company said she had used 490 gigabytes of data since July 21.

The next day, the company turned off her phone, claiming her usage had jumped to 569 gigabytes.

Well at least she got smart about it and changed to T-Mobile...
 
There's a hack that with certain hardware you can simulate any sim card and use somebody's carrier plan. (Just like there's a hack to reprogram a cable modem so it works on somebody else's account). Or how cable guys can offer you all the channels you want for free for a certain work bonus.
 
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She could also be part of a mobile botnet, hitting an s3 bucket for command and control 400 times...
 
There needs to be protection written into legislation for this type of thing... ie... make it illegal for contracts that have open ended data fees.

Hows this?

All wireless contracts must cut off data service if the amount double or triples the bill.

Does a company really expect people normally paying $100 a month to all of the sudden just drop $10,000 like it's nothing?
 
There needs to be protection written into legislation for this type of thing... ie... make it illegal for contracts that have open ended data fees.

Hows this?

All wireless contracts must cut off data service if the amount double or triples the bill.

Does a company really expect people normally paying $100 a month to all of the sudden just drop $10,000 like it's nothing?

Happens every day. Businesses in particular but many small businesses run their plans under personal names. I.E.: Emergency in China but I have to close a deal in the Netherlands while my IT guys Internet is down in Nebraska . . . Cellular can solve a lot of problems with that, but it will cost, and businesses will gladly pay it.
 
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