Verizon Class Action Nets Piddly Payouts Over Company’s Completely Bogus Fees
from the ripping-people-off-is-fun,-creative-and-legal! dept
Last year U.S. broadband giant Verizon faced yet another class action lawsuit for sleazy, misleading fees. This latest $100 million class action alleged that Verizon for years ripped off its customers via a $3 (and up) “Administrative and Telco Recovery Charge” that it tacked at the bottom of user bills to help the company falsely advertise a lower price at the point of sale.
Verizon ultimately settled the lawsuit last October. But whereas class action participants were promised payouts between $15 and $100, many Reddit posters say they were lucky to see $6 or $7:
“I got 5.77! We should put our money together and buy a billboard outside Verizon with a picture of a middle finger on it.”
Countless cable and broadband companies tack on a myriad of completely bogus fees below the line, letting them advertise one rate — then sock you with a higher rate once your bill actually arrives. These companies will then brag repeatedly about how they haven’t raised rates yet this year, when that’s almost never actually the case.
One 2019 Consumer Reports study found that about 24% of consumer bills are comprised of bullshit fees, generating cable giants $28 billion in additional revenue annually. Some of the fees, like Centurylink’s “Internet Cost Recovery Fee” are comical gibberish. Others, such as “regulatory recovery fees,” pretend to be taxes to try and redirect the consumer’s ire toward government.
While class action lawsuits can modestly shift company behavior, it doesn’t really drive lasting change. Neither do state or federal fines, which often wind up being a small fraction of the money made off the practice, assuming they aren’t litigated down to nothing.
Class actions were flimsy enough. But starting in 2011 with a landmark AT&T Supreme Court case, America proudly decided it was legal to let companies use contract find print to force customers into binding arbitration, a lopsided pseudo-legal venture in which corporations win disputes the majority of the time. So the problem persisted.
The Biden administration made some promising noise about cracking down on such fees, but in telecom most of those efforts wound up being somewhat hollow. Like the Biden FCC creation of a new “nutrition label” rule that requires ISPs be more transparent about fees, but fall short of actually stopping your ISP or wireless carrier from ripping you off. Under Trump 2.0 I suspect those rules will never be enforced.
So the predatory corporate behavior, and the performative legal and regulatory solutions for it, will continue.
Filed Under: administrative and Telco recovery charge, binding arbitration, class action, fees
Companies: verizon
Comments on “Verizon Class Action Nets Piddly Payouts Over Company’s Completely Bogus Fees”
I’m not interested but Verizon certainly does if you can prevent data breaches 😉
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He can’t, but he CAN scam you out of your money and steal your identity, which is almost, but not quite, the complete opposite of that
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My credit’s been frozen since the ’17 Equifax breach. Far from bulletproof, but there’s lower-hanging fruit.
A final F you from Verizon
We left in late 2022 after 18 years with VZW, but it seems they get one last laugh. $14 and change instead of $100. Oh well, never another penny to them.
Democrats failed us.
First by not insisting Republicans remove [Drumpf] from public life and shutting down the government until they did.
Second, by losing to the weakest most corrupt person ever to run for president.
Pathetic Party. Only AOC and a few others are worth listening to. The rest should resign in disgrace.
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That’s nice hun. Now it’s past your nap time.
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When it comes to technology, the only person in Congress who can be relied on consistently is Ron Wyden. Ignoring him in a comment like yours implies that you don’t know much about tech policy and/or your Congressional representation.
AOC is fine in some areas, but occasionally questionable when it comes to tech.
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Agreed.
The Tech industry has brought us social media. Social media has brought us live videos of mass shooters in real time, outright lying about everything, people spending more time looking at their phones than they do with their children, children spending more time looking at their phones and body shaming each other than real life socializing or even listening to teachers in class, distracted drivers playing with their phones instead of looking at the road, and recently, AI girlfriends and boyfriends because people are losing the ability to actually converse with other people. Meanwhile, the oligarchy of Peter Thiel and Tech characters are getting richer and more powerful, to the point of actually having private meetings with elected legislators and giving advice to (some might say also controlling) the [] President.
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go away doomposter
Burying the lede
What the article says, and Karl notably doesn’t, is that this was a monthly charge. $5.77 would be a very good settlement for a one-time charge, maybe okay for an occasional charge, but quite bad for anyone who’d paid this scam fee several times.
As my high-school physics teacher used to repeat, you’re not gonna understand what’s going on till you properly identify the units.
Verizon’s class action payouts are like their fees— small enough to still make you feel ripped off but just big enough to buy a coffee and complain about it!
Remember when verizon was sued for charging a bogus internet access charge when no access was granted?
Had to call them out on it almost every damn month and they would remove it.