Verizon: How Much Do You Charge Now?
Starting next week, Verizon will double the early-termination fee for smartphones. That is, if you get a BlackBerry, Android or similar phone from Verizon, and you decide to switch phones before your two-year contract is up, you'll be socked with a $350 penalty (it used to be $175) ... What bothers me more, though, is another bit of greedy nastiness that readers both inside and outside Verizon have noticed. ... [quoting a customer] "Virtually every bill I get has a couple of erroneous data charges at $1.99 each - yet we download no data.
"Here's how it works. They configure the phones to have multiple easily hit keystrokes to launch 'Get it Now' or 'Mobile Web' - usually a single key like an arrow key. Often we have no idea what key we hit, but up pops one of these screens. The instant you call the function, they charge you the data fee. We cancel these unintended requests as fast as we can hit the End key, but it doesn't matter; they've told me that ANY data - even one kilobyte - is billed as 1MB. The damage is done. --------------- rest (and make sure to check out the comments):
_____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key snipped-for-privacy@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]