Please observe the following e-mail I just submitted to AT&T. It’s not a huge deal, but conning me for $50 is pissing me off nonetheless. Worthless assholes.
I’ll keep you posted.
Any other Dopers that got screwed over like this?
pay phones are notorious. Collect call (local) from a pay phone can be billed at rates that would reduce the national debt. (or so it seems).
I get ripped off by phone companies all the time. My wife is from Thailand, so whenever I fly there, I’m always laid over in various countries…japan, korea(their phones are ridiculous), Taiwan…I always buy phone cards for that particular country over the net, before I go, and I seem to avoid getting gouged.
Pay phones are frequently sub-contracted, and they can charge astoundingly high, even extortionate rates. When I was arecruiter, every station in my district had a calling card that by-passed the local payphone contractors billing, which we would hand to our applicants before they went to the MEPS (place where you get your physical, swore in, etc). The pay phones ther had been subcontracted by Bell South to some sonuvabitch company that charged US$9.99 for a collect call.
Tell me that ain’t highway robbery!
They also like to charge more for you to call a cell phone than a land line. But they don’t tell you that, because heaven forbid they actually inform you of anything.
You should also know that AT&T bills in minute increments at pay phones. So, if you call someone, listen to their phone ring once and hang up, you get charged for a whole minute.
I definitely second the calling card idea. You’ll save yourself money and grief.
What, they start charging from the moment it connects, rather than the moment the other person picks up? What a fucking travesty.
I knew about the one minute increments, but it doesn’t explain the huge costs unless there’s a starting fee. Even if you really pay for a ringing phone on the other side of the line, it wouldn’t be $7.50, as that seems to indicate that I listened to a ringing phone for half an hour. Five times. :rolleyes:
Nope, there’s a starting fee all right. The only question is: how well are they at bollocksing up an explanation for it?
Well, since you’re using AT&T, I’m sure they’ve tacked on a starting fee. Just like if you subscribe to AT&T for your home phone and they charge you $4.95 a month just to have the service.
Ten bucks says that if you even hear back from them, they’re going to say, ‘oh, well, that money goes to taxes and blah-biddy-blah-blah’ and basically tell you to suck it up.
Mr. Athena recently spent a week in Texas. He called me several times, collect, because his cell phone wasn’t working well in the location he was in. He used 1-800-collect most of the time, but it didn’t always work, so he used some other collect service.
We got the bill last month. The fuckers billed us over $2/minute. The damn phone calls added up to over $300.00. I knew they were going to jack us for calling collect, but he was in a remote location, the cell phone didn’t work, and he had no way to buy a pre-paid phone card.
Fuckers.
Oh, that’s nuttin!! My wife recently called me direct from Seattle and we talked for 4 MINUTES (!) from a hotel to give me her room number and they charged her $46.
We are contesting it since she paid by credit card.
That’s right! Fucking AT&T bastards! BASTARDS!!!
Sorry, I really have nothing to add, but since AT&T is the company that laid me off in April, I’m more than happy and more than bitter enough to trash talk the old company.
Down with AT&T!
Bastards!
You know, Coldy, if I was still working there, this wouldn’t have happened. Yeah, that’s why they let me go, I didn’t screw the customer hard enough. Yeah, that’s what I’ll tell myself…
Five days since I mailed them my question, and no response yet.
So I sent them a quick reminded:
Doesn’t look like AT&T think very highly of their customers, does it?
Am I the only one who immediately jumped to the correct conclusion that it really was 25 cents per minute if you used coins?
And considering I’ve used phones with that offer, the key is the phrase “direct-dialed”. That kind of deal has always been pretty clear to me.
If that’s true, then wouldn’t you agree with me that it’s a fucking scam to phrase it like that on a payphone in an international terminal at an airport?
I don’t recall the phrase, BTW. The phone booth had enough small print instructions on it to keep me occupied for 3 hours. But the one thing that stood out was “25 cents a minute for all long distance calls in the US”, in a much larger font. I didn’t see any caveats in the immediate vicinity of said claim, so I went ahead and pulled out the MasterCard.
You could very well be right, Thunder. But $7.51 for letting a phone ring twice is a con job, whether you use coins or a card.
Coldfire:
Don’t waste your time with them. Dispute the charge on your credit card and have it removed.
By law, they can’t annotate or reduce your credit rating over a phone charge dispute.
Then, for evidence, send them a written letter, stating the history of your attempts to contact them, and your reason for disputing the charge. Keep a copy.
Your credit card company will remove the charge, and the onus will be on them to prove the validity of the charge.
You’ve got no argument from me there, Coldfire.
Also, it would be interesting to see how much the airport authority gets in profit from scams like this. I’m sure this is a very profitable part of the budget.
Typically the rate advertised on the actual phone is the rate they charge if you put coins in the phone.
It’s always more if you use a card.
The Saga continues. This time, someone at AT&T woke up when their inbox said “ping”. Here’s what the individual handling my case told me:
Thank you, Sheila.
Do you wanna know what I wrote back, after doing exactly what Sheila told me? I bet you would.
And I just got the cheery confirmation that “Your message has
been received and an answer will be sent to you within 24 hours”. Golly, can’t wait.
I’ll second Scylla but first a story. Quick Geography lesson Hayward, CA is roughly 10 miles form Oakland, keep that in mind as you read on. My wife called me collect from outside a store in Hayward, she wanted clarification for something I asked her to pick up. We talked perhaps thirty seconds. Two weeks ago my phone bill showed up, the collect call was billed through some comapny I never heard of starting with a Z.
Collect Call Hayward Ca 1 minute $29.00
Now I already knew what to do about this, so I called up PacBell and told them to send it back to the biller, Pac Bell cheerfully removed it from the bill. What you don’t know: Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the Biller will do nothing, they count on people not checking their bills, and they write the disputed calls off. I’m not sure if this is true of all carriers but the three times I’ve had this happen, the number listed for the Biller gives you precisely the number for your carrier who will again cheerfully remove the charges.
Now, there’s a coupe of things wrong with this information.
First off, this: Using the AT&T network to place a call to be billed to a major credit card will incur a $4.99 surcharge for the connection plus an 89 cent per minute rate. Payphone fees will also apply.
Huh? OK, so they admit they’re a bunch of thieving fucks, unwilling to advertise the true rates of credit card paid phone calls on the machine. But what do they mean with “payphone fees will also apply”? Didn’t they just describe the payphone fees?
Secondly: The advertised rate published on the payphone would be in regard to accessing the line to make a local call. In that case, you would not have been asked for a credit card or calling card number to bill the connection fees.
Flat out lie. The machine said “25 cents per minute for all long distance calls within the US”. Period. This may not apply to credit card calls, but it sure as hell didn’t apply to local calls alone. Who the fuck makes a local call in an international airport terminal, anyway? Not the entire world lives in New Jersey, you know.
In addition, I wasn’t asked for my CC, I used it by dialling 9 or 0 or whatever gets you to the AT&T operator line.
So here we are. I still maintain they’re a bunch of thieves, and it shows that they are (deliberately or not) spreading misinformation, if not lies, about their service.
I still have half a mind to withdraw the payments. What do you guys say? My motivation is this:[ul][]Phone booth displays apparently unrestricted rate of 25 cents per minute for long distance, which turns out to be 89 cents when you use a credit card.[]Nowhere on the machine, nor on the automated AT&T operator line is there any mention of the scandalous $4.99 connection surcharge for every call when using a credit card. Hell, I wouldn’t have called 6 times had this been properly indicated![/ul]Do I owe these pricks money or not? I still say it’s a scam.
I wouldn’t pay them. ATT is run by a board room of Robber Barons and I swore a long time ago that neither they nor Southwestern Bell, the local provider, would get any more of my money. Thank the heavens for independent phone companies.