Two Questions About Current TV Commercials.

Factual Questions
1

  1. A current Geico commercial has a new father calling his father collect and giving his name as “Bob Wehadanewbabyitsaboy” His father doesn’t accept the call, and tells mother that Bob has a baby.
    The tag line of the commercial is “Save money the legal way. Call Geico.”
    Question: is what Bob did illegal? I am a lawyer, and I have no idea. My original thought was this is theft of services - the phone company is in the business of allowing us to pass information on their phone lines for a fee, and you are robbing them of that fee. My roomie (also a lawyer) says no, the phone company has the right to refuse to connect the callers, and should under these circumstances. If it doesn’t, then it is allowing this, so it’s not theft. Whatcha think?

  2. Verizon (formerly Bell Atlantic, to you Left Coasters) is heavily promoting “pay talk talk talk” - you pay Verizon in advance for phone calls, then use your credits. To my mind, this only helps the phone company; they get your money ahead of time, so they earn interest, not you. Is there any advantage to the consumer?

Discuss.

Sua

2

  1. That’s an old scam – making a collect call to yourself to indicate that you’ve arrived somewhere safely, for instance. I don’t think it’s actually illegal (or at least, it costs the phone company more money to prosecute than the cost of the call, so they don’t bother). I suspect GEICO’s lawyers wouldn’t let them put on an ad showing an actual criminal activity.

  2. In theory, the customer gets a lower phone rate for paying in advance.

3

Pre-paid may be the only service you can get. There are many people with poor credit who are only eligible for a pre-paid calling plan. In this way they can get some type of phone service. Customers seem to like it. Some may also be using it to budget their time on the phone so they do not spend too much each month.

It is probably not as bad as those check cashing places because we’re not talking about about a lot of money and I’ll bet that most people use their minutes within a week or two.

4

Just to clarify: Verizon is pushing pre-pay for all of its customers now, not just those with poor credit.

Sua