Businesses who mostly make money by tricking people and adding hidden fees

In My Humble Opinion
81

I know that cellphone companies were mentioned, but i’d like to give a flip side of the response as a former rep - there’s this thing called quotas. And commission. And it all sucks. You see, if you offer the product feature and the customer says no, an unethical rep finds a way to bypass this. Some of these reps are really good at getting away with fraud for awhile… but they eventually get caught and fired after a lengthy investigation. Some reps never get caught because they make sure their doings are few and far between. But guess what - because these people drove up sales, your quotas went up and even though they got busted, your quotas stay the same or even increase to make up for the future loss, which then circles around to drive an otherwise honest person into adding features the customer never asked for, or “trick” them into agreeing to try it by luring them with the free month or whatnot and a promise to remove it after the trial to only “forget” so they dont get a chargeback right away just so that rep can meet the guidelines and not lose their job.

I’ve seen many reps lose their jobs because of this - and it wasnt because they werent asking per their quality scores/monitorings! And unfortunately had to let go of some really good Customer Service reps because they just couldnt match the sales quotas… it used to not be that way, and it was a lot easier to bust the crooks when you had seperate departments. And trust me, it is practically an act of congress to get rid of the real bad seeds (a big complaint was that reps no longer reported possible/fraud because they didnt think it mattered due to the time frame of action - were talking months here w/concrete evidence).

Then this company took away most of the customer service and made everyone into a sales rep - just different levels of sales.

I helped crack a lot of the major fraud actvities that went on where I was stationed (I was relocated a few times)… never a thank you or good job because I knew that even though they were cleaning up the bad seeds, they were no longer “cleaning up” on their numbers.

Corporate America sucks. damn. greedy. bastards.

Oh - Credit card companies that can chage your rate if something changes on your credit report and doesnt even have anything to do with them - and might even be an error on the report! Does that count?

82

Nobody has mentioned car tires. I love how the ad says $69.99 per tire, so I’m thinking 70 bucks times 4, so $280 plus tax. The bill comes to $522.11.

WTF. I look at the bill and there is the:

Valve Replacement
Balancing
Tire Disposal
Road Hazard
State Tire Tax
Local Tire Tax
KY Jelly Tax

I’m all in favor of a law that requires that an advertised price be the all-inclusive prices (with taxes and all). So, if you say that I can have this widget for $19.95, then I give you a
$20 bill, you give me the widget and five cents change. I’m all for the free market, but honesty should be required as well.

Also, if you have an asterisk next to your advertised price, and flash three seconds of four paragraphs worth of legalese, then you should be drug out back and shot.

83

Now, now, let’s be reasonable. Bullets are expensive, steak sauce is cheap, and there are plenty of stray dogs going hungry.

84

Yeah, she should have taken more care with that. But it’s a dishonest way to do business and it’s pretty clearly designed to score easy money off people who assume that they’re only agreeing to buy the things they want.

85

Well, gosh, that’s the whole point. They don’t WANT you paying your bill on time. I am quite confident that if gonzomax had send cold cash, they would have claimed a 3 to 5 day “dropping the cash off at the bank” period, and still charged late fees. If he had actually showed up at their office with the money, accompanied by a Secret Service counterfeit expert with a sworn affadavit stating that the cash was legitimate currency, they would have said they don’t take payments in person, and iof they do it’ll take up to three business days for it to “show up in the system.” They make big bux on late fees.

I always find it amusing how so many of the companies I do business with will send be a bill “dated” three weeks before it arrives in my mailbox. If I send a letter to friends or family it takes two, three, maybe four business days at the absolute most. It doesn’t take three weeks for me to send regular mail to San Diego, and that’s in another country. Curiously, it takes the toll highway people’s bill most of the month to arrive, at which point the due date is often just a few days away.

I’ve gone to automatic bill payments everywhere I can, but then you watch the bank account like a hawk for “Accidental” double payments.

Actually, I remember my former employer, a big ISO 9001/14001/etc. management systems registration house, did something like this. Things were going poorly, primarily because management wasted a lot of money, so they decided they’d just add $300 to every customer’s bill as a “registration fee.” There was no added value for the $300; they just decided they could take the customers for a lot of money. They figured most large businesses would not notice, since they’re compartmentalized and accounts payable wouldn’t know or care if the bill should be $5134 or $5434. Small businesses that complained were given a song and dance and, if necessary, offered a new invoice without the $300 charge - but it would be added to the next audit’s invoice in the hopes they would not notice that time.

jtgain, I’ve learned something else about tires; when you see ads from tire places who have HUGE SPECIALS for tires costing $49 each, those ads are meant only as a joke. No matter what vehicle you are driving, the tires YOU need are not the $49 versions. The tires that fit YOUR common vehicle are twice as expensive, and then you get into the “fees.”

I have driven a great many vehicles, some big and some small, none exotic, and none used the magical Super Cheap On-Special Tires. The $49 tires are a set in one bizarre size, like a 145 R46 that fits those big wheel bicycles you see on the playing cards, and in fact there is only one set in the entire world, set behind glass in a Great Central Tire Warehouse, that they know will never be sold but have to exist somewhere so they they can’t be sued for false advertising. The tires you need are 195 R16, which fit 48 different varieties of cars both foreign and domestic, and cost $119 a pop.

86

Oh, and I just must tell this story:

Canadian natural gas dealer Enbridge settled a class action suit for illegal late payment penalties. They recently announced that they plan to pay for this by charging all their customers a special fee for paying for the lawsuit.

Swear to God.

87

My hero. I’m so glad you didn’t call of the dogs. I would have been disheartened.

88

Seven years ago I was forced to stay at “Circus Circus” in Las Vegas. They hit me with a $12 per phone call “access charge” in addition to the toll for the actualy call. I screamed at the $96 in bogus charges until the clerk took them off.

Don’t get me started on PSE&G in New Jersey. I have a $200 “delivery fee” on my bill. I have gas pipes that come into my house from the city grid that have been in the ground for 70 years; I asked the CSR if they had miniature people running back and forth through the pipes, delivering the gas drop by drop. He was not amused.

89

Discover Card suckered me into paying for their Payment Protection Plan (89 cents on every $100) and almost got me to buy Identity Theft Protection ($12.99 a month).

They basically called me and asked if I wanted to know more about their Payment Protection Plan, and when I said yes, they signed me up. :confused:

I thought it was suspicious that the salesperson asked for my confirmation for enrollment in the program, but I thought it was for the program to get information, not the actual program that I would have to pay money for.

The swarmy bastards tried to do the same thing with their Identity Theft Protection, but I knew better that time.

Now I check my statements religiously not only to protect myself from identity theft, but also to make sure that my own credit card company doesn’t try to screw me over.

90

I think what you mean is that their primary business can be dressed up to look like it is selling product. We’ve done the issue to death if you search for threads, but I seem to recall that Amway sell very little to 3rd parties. They very strongly encourage each new person that signs up as a distributor to buy all Amway products for their own home. That on its own is a surprisingly large percentage of their sales. So in fact recruiting new members is a large part of their business.

91

Sneaky credit card offers. You know, the ones that say **Only 1.9% Interest!!! **in big flashy letters. Then, when you read the fine print, once your account is opened, you will be assessed

An account activation fee
An annual fee
A confirmation fee
A credit check fee
A Ha Ha You Didn’t Read the Fine Print Fee

etc. Generally, these fees add up to $200 before you’ve even gotten the card! I always get a good giggle out of them before they go in the shredder, but I wonder how many people, desperate for a credit card, fall for them.

Also, pre-paid gym memberships. I used to know a woman who worked at one, and routinely, when the gym was a bit short on cash, she said they would “accidentally” double bill the clients who were paying via automatic debit/credit. If they were called on it, it was “Oops, terribly sorry, we’ll fix it” but if you didn’t catch it, you were screwed.

92

Not really a business adding fees, but I was looking at my cell bill and there was a charge for $9.95 on my extra phone that I haven’t used for several months. No air time on it. No text messages. Just a charge for $9.95. I called billing to ask about it and was told it was for a “ringtone subscription” by a third party vendor.

Yep. Some fly by night had pulled my number out of a random number generator and signed me up. My cell company cheerfully refunded the current and previous month’s charge and blocked the vendor from further charges. I’m still out for the very first month they had ganked me so I’m still annoyed about that.

93

Just a slight hijack here – when he was in grad school in the mid-late 80s, my younger brother bought and drove a Fiat X-1/9. He said one of the best things about owning it was that it was the only car on the road that actually did use the oddball tire size those advertisements used for their ‘starting price’. :slight_smile:

And while it’s hardly a hidden fee, the “Destination charge” for a new car seems to have skyrocketed to astonishing levels. I’m looking at new cars right now, and the destination charges are in the $600 - 700 ranges.

94

Chase Bank did something similar to this with their online Mastercard payments. Say my payment was due the 30th. I’d log on the 28th or so to pay my bill, it would be transfered from my checking account. But they need 3 or 4 days to process the transaction! Look, if I authorize you to deduct $xxx from my checking account and it takes you 3 or 4 days, that’s your problem not mine. But I was sure I’d be fighting a late fee if I let it go.

And THEN, to top it all off, they offered faster payment processing for $4.00 or so!!! :mad: That’s when I canceled my Chase card.

95

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the idea to buy their insurance so that in case there is an accident it doesn’t count as a mark against your own personal policy and cause your rates to get jacked up?

96

I used to work in the cell phone handset protection insurance [del]racket[/del] industry. You know, the service they try to sell you when you get a new cell phone, where for a mere additional $4.99 or so a month, your phone is protected against loss, theft or damage.

It’s a complete and utter ripoff.

  1. What people often don’t realize (from not reading the fine print) is that when they call to file a claim on a lost, stolen or damaged phone, they’ll have to pay a deductible, cleverly called a “processing fee.” This fee ranges from $50 to $150 or more, depending on the wireless carrier and the model of the phone.

  2. Another thing they often don’t realize is that in the majority of cases, the replacement phone they receive is a refurbished phone, not a new phone. The company I worked for (the largest in the industry) recently lost a class action lawsuit over this, because our claims reps would refer to “your new phone.” Now they’re careful to say “your replacement phone.” It matters because the warranty on refurbs is shorter and less inclusive than the one on new phones.

  3. They get these refurbished phones essentially free, because if you file a claim for a damaged phone, you have to send the damaged phone to the insurance company. This means they have a stream of free phones rolling in to their repair center, which are refurbished by their techs and turned right back around to be sent to the next customer. In every case, the cost to refurbish the phone is less than the deductible the customer paid to process the claim, so the company is turning a profit already. The $4.99 a month from all the people who never end up filing a claim is pure gravy on top.

So, to recap: you’re paying $4.99 a month for the privilege of paying $80 for a $50 refurbished phone. Nice business. :rolleyes:

97

It doesn’t matter if your company pays out or not, really. If there is an accident that goes on your MVR you will generally be held accountable for it. The only time I would ever recommend getting the insurance they offer is if you carry liabililty only on your own vehicles or if you don’t own a vehicle and wouldn’t have your own insurance to fall back on. And also your regular auto policy (generally speaking) will not cover you in a U-haul or any other type of box truck.

98

On the other side of this story, my son works for Enterprise. You would not believe the percentage of people that come in to rent a car after theirs gets wrecked and then wreck the rental.
Also with the coverage, all you have to do is fill out an accident report. Nothing else. No deductible. For some people the convenience is worth it.
His most recent story was about the Einstein family. Mom wrecked her car. Rents a replacement from Enterprise. She springs for the insurance. She totals the rental. No problem, come in fill out an accident report, and tell us where to pick up the pieces. She does, and gets another rental.
her son, the budding genius, then calls up and demands that Enterprise refund the $12/day for the first two days that mom was driving the first car, because they were ripping her off.
My son = :confused:
My son very carefully explains to Young Einstein that his mom has a choice. She can pay the 12/day for two days for a total of $24 dollars, or she can come in and leave a check for $2000 (the deductible on her personal auto policy) and they will gladly refund her the $24 she paid.
YE still wanted the $24 bucks back.
No problem was the reply, just come in and give us a check for $2000 and we will be more than happy to give you $24 dollars.
I don’t think he was a math major in school.

99

Its a minor case compared to the scams seen here, but there were a lot of eBay stores selling furniture stuff at low prices, but with huge shipping charges. We, talking a couple hundred dollars here. This was not for some heavy ubertable or bed. We’re talking about a simple iron trellis that comes in a shipping box and weighs maybe 15 lbs.

It was often hard to find the shipping charges in the listings. Part of the scam was the hiding the shippin charges from the customer, but more of it was hiding the majority of the cost from eBay.

100

Well, you’d think that, but experience has shown me that the more advanced mathematics you learn, the worse your ability to do basic arithmetic gets.