After an FCC investigation, Verizon Wireless accepted responsibility for billing errors and apologized to customers who received accidental data charges on their bills. Verizon is issuing credits and refunds from $2 to $6.
In the settlement with the FCC, Verizon agreed to a voluntary payment of $25 million to the U.S. Treasury even though they claim that inaccurate billing was inadvertent.
The settlement acknowledges a prior announcement that Verizon will reimburse about 15 million current and former customers who may have been mistakenly billed. The company will spend $52.8 million to reimburse those customers.
Verizon also will provide targeted information about data usage and tracking to new and existing customers in both English and Spanish; establish a special internal team to track, identify and address customer data usage complaints; and provide additional training on data charge and credit issues to all of its customer-facing customer care employees.
Verizon says that it has started the process of repaying the 15 million customers for accidental past data charges that was discovered through their own investigation in response to customer inquiries. These inadvertent charges affect those customers who do not have data plans and choose to pay for data usage on a per megabyte basis.
The company is notifying eligible current and former customers that it is applying credits to their accounts or is sending refunds in October and November. Current customers will be notified in upcoming bills; former customers will receive a letter and refund check in the mail. In most cases, these credits and refunds are in the $2 to $6 range; some will receive larger amounts. Seventy seven million, or roughly five out of six Verizon customers, are unaffected.
Verizon Stated:
"We have taken steps to ensure this does not happen in the future."
By far the single largest problem, involving the vast majority of credits, was caused by a very small data "acknowledgment" session sent by software that was pre-loaded on certain phones. For customers who did not have data plans and who were not otherwise using data features on their devices, a "pay as you go" charge of $1.99 was triggered. "We never intended to charge customers for this 'acknowledgment' data session. In other cases, we accidentally charged customers for access to website links that were not supposed to trigger data charges. Once again, this affected only some of the customers who did not have data plans, and who were not otherwise intentionally using the data features on their devices.
We have put in place additional improvements to resolve issues that caused these accidental charges. We are changing software on future devices to remove acknowledgments and prevent them from triggering the small data 'acknowledgment' sessions. Other steps involve enhancing internal controls on website links that should be free to access as well as additional software improvements.
We are a company that listens to its customers, and in this case, we got to the bottom of a problem and resolved the errors. We have taken this action because it is the right thing to do. We value our customers and their trust in us, and we do everything in our power every day to earn and keep that trust."