Mike had his phone stolen and $239 in fraudulent calls made to Africa on November 4th, and even though he reported the charges on November 5th, Tmobile says he still has to pay up. Their inviolable policy is that you’re responsible for the charges up until you report the phone as stolen. Mike recorded his failed attempts to get Tmobile to credit his account.
At one point, Mike says, “We’ve been customers of yours for three years, with two phones, and two numbers on one one phone… We’ve never once called any country on the continent of Africa, and then all of a sudden on 3am in the morning on the 4th we decide to call Mali?”
Now Tmobile expects him to pay the full charges, and buy a replacement phone, a phone that will cost him more than it would a new customer. Under those terms, what incentive does he have to stay a customer? None, as he’s out of contract with them.
He even points this out, saying how Tmobile can get $239 from him now and then not a cent more, or credit his account and get many hundreds more over the course of his lifetime. This petty human logic bounces off the Tmobile-tron like a pebble off a tank.
There needs to be a federal consumer protection law, similar to what there is for credit cards, that limits consumer liability as long as they report the theft within a certain period of time.
You can listen to the call here (Running time: 17:05)
(Photo: Getty)
More From Consumerist
-
Proactiv Has My Box Of Skin Cream, Sends Collections After Me Anyway
-
Make Sure You Get The Right T-Mobile iPhone Or You’ll Get Stuck In The Slow Lane
-
These Workers Know Their Jobs Make The World A Worse Place But A Job Is A Job, Right?
-
Man With Uninsured $430K Lamborghini Finds $568 Ticket Outrageously High
-
If Your Company Runs The Do Not Call List, Make Sure The Telemarketing Department Checks It
Considering he reported it stolen within a day, and taking into account the oddity of calls to Africa at 3 AM, you’d think TMobile would recognize something is up. Maybe he thought the phone was lost or misplaced.
Plus, it doesn’t seem like this is exactly a situation where fraud works that well. Report phone stolen after you make irregular charges (why you’d all of a sudden need to make enough of these charges I don’t know). Phone is deactivated, you have to buy a new phone, which isn’t always the cheapest thing ever, or involves reupping contracts and shelling out for another two years.
If he didnt report the phone stolen that day its his fault .Go ahead and try to explain why it isnt. If I lose my phone within an hour I report it lost.
He reported the phone a day or two after it was stolen.Its his fault for being lazy.
I had this experience with Sprint. My phone was stolen (quite obviously stolen: my friend’s car was broken into and many things were missing). We knew about the theft less than an hour after it occurred. I neglected to report it to Sprint for 6 hours, during which time around 6 hours of calls were made to various South American countries (and I’ve never made a call to South America in 7 years as a Sprint customer).
Sprint agreed, after a long CSR call, to remove half the long-distance charges from my bill. That would’ve satisfied me, had I not had a police report on file describing the event, listing the exact time it occurred. The report would’ve cleared up any discrepancy about when I lost control of the phone, but when I offered it the CSR refused to even accept a copy for consideration.
The upshot is that a rep at the Sprint store gave me the new-customer price for a new phone. In the end I was content with that, but I’m still annoyed with the (pretty rude, actually) treatment I got from the CSR.
@Pylon83:
Ok… there are so many things wrong with this mans experience…
First…The customer is always right. This may be old and cliche’, but it’s THE single best customer service policy of all time. Either Tmobile doesn’t care enough, or their corporate or legal staff are too incompetent to realize this and/or the following issues…
It’s Tmobiles JOB to protect their customers from this kind of thing from the get go. Contract schmontract. Did YOU read YOUR entire cell contract? To really do it right, did you have your lawyers review it before you signed it? I’m not even going to get into US/World literacy statistics, much less any comprehension of legalese stated in such contracts. We’re talking the general public here. Have you MET the general public?!
If they had any sense, international calling would be disabled by default, and only activated with an additional contract stating the obvious, with further protection (a pin perhaps, as stated, possibly only certain countries enabled.)
With technology progressing as it is, this will become an increasingly common occurrence. If these policies don’t change, I won’t ever be buying groceries or starting my car via my phone.
Hell, for all we know, it could be unofficial policy for Tmobile to refuse to deal with this kind of thing because of the additional revenue!!
Did he know it was stolen that day? Did he even know he didn’t have it that day? Did he look for it that day?
@majortom1981: how do you know it was lost within an hour? There are people who use their phone infrequently enough that they would not notice it was gone until they went to put it on the nightstand for next morning.
@grlzero: “That would’ve satisfied me, had I not had a police report on file describing the event, listing the exact time it occurred. ” What does that have to do with anything? Fine your phone got stolen – sucks. Nobody is saying its your fault. But how is it Sprint’s fault? Why should they pick up the tab?
@LTS!:
“It’s simple, you purchase a piece of equipment, if you don’t know what it does then you are a moron.”
So if I buy a car and I don’t know how the engine works and how to repair it, I’m a moron?
Not everybody else is as intellectually gifted with electronics as you are.
@avconsumer:
So you think that any large corporation should hold your hand and make sure you don’t get into any trouble? That’s absurd. T-Mobile owes them nothing other than providing service. T-Mobile should not be expected to notice odd calling patterns if the phone has not been reported stolen. That’s why you must report it stolen and why you are responsible for any calls up until that point. I’m sorry, T-Mobile is 100% right here. If you lose the phone, or it gets stolen, its more your fault than it is T-Mobiles, and with that in mind, you should bear the loss, not them.
@meballard:
You’re right, VZW doesn’t have I-dial automatically set up on phones. You have to have service with them at least a month first before they’ll even add it.
One thing I would suggest to people is to have features they *know* they’ll never use blocked. For example, say you know you aren’t ever going to download music onto your phone. Block it. Because if someone steals your phone, a lot of times they’ll start downloading like mad. I’ve seen it happen on many accounts in cases of stolen phones. So it isn’t just phone calls you have to worry about with this issue. In fact, quite a few people that steal phones won’t make calls that could end up leading the cops back to them (they will sure call the heck out of those sex phone numbers though. And for some reason it seems they are all based out of the Dominican Republic.).
@CarlR: Yeah, I think he just got unlucky with the rep. I’ve had tmobile for years and I’ve never had anything but good service. When I call them with a random question, they suggest ways I can save money on my account.
And, as far as I know, they’re at least one company that didn’t wrap up my records in a bow and hand them over to the government.
[disclaimer: I do not work for tmobile, nor do I even know anyone who works for tmobile.]
I am a T-Mobile customer, and international calling is OFF by default on your account when you start service. You can turn it on by talking to a CSR or logging on to the my.t-mobile website and checking a box on your list of services.
Either way, you have to positively know you’re doing it, because even if you’re using the web, the page will inform you “You have enabled international calling blah blah blah. Are you sure you wish to do this?” and you have to say yes AGAIN.
SO – if this guy says that he didn’t have his international dialing on or didn’t know anything about it, I would call BS on that as T-Mobile kind of makes it a big deal if you want it on.
Now, the dude that stole his phone may have called T-Mobile to enable it, but he would have had to have known the victim’s SS number, or have gotten a CSR that didn’t give a shit about verifying the guy’s identity before turning on the service. In that case, this mess would be T-Mobile’s fault. He can ask T-Mobile exactly when his international dialing service was enabled on his account. That may be a more interesting question.
What he needs to do (and this may very well have already happened) is call T-mobile, tell them he is upset with the service and is going to cancel due to this charge. As he is not under contract, they will transfer him to retention, who will offer to credit either part or all of the fee and probably give him a new phone at a heavy discount if he agrees to resign his contract(not most desirable, but certainly better than just paying the bill and signing a contract with a new company with an activation fee and possibly deposit who will likely cause him similar problems in the future and probably has EXACTLY the same policy in regards to lost/stolen phones.
)
So pretend you decide to call internationally and rack up a high bill. Then you call and say that you didn’t make that call and your phone was stolen. Lets say Tmobile just credits that and they do that for all the customers that say that. It would be a ridiculous loss in profits. There has to be a rule in play. And those that lose their phones really need to take action and have their service suspended. Suspending the line not only saves the cell phone companies money but also the customer. I have no sympathy for a person who doesn’t take responsibility.
MACBASTARD: most lines have international dialing capabilities turned on automatically. You have to specifically request to have international dialing barred. I do just in case. Honestly, I would call your carrier first before assuming your line is set up with international dialing barred. If you don’t use your phone to dial internationally (and if so, why aren’t you using a calling card?) then ask your carrier to block your phone’s ability to dial international numbers. This will save your hide if you get your phone stolen.
I had much the same experience with Tmobile. My phone got stolen, and apparently *nobody* at Tmobile thought anything was odd about a guy who used about 30-40 minutes of a 400 minute family plan to call his mother over the course of a month, suddenly racking up $2300 in international calls to Africa. It was eventually resolved, without my having to fork over a couple thousand dollars for a phone that was reported stolen (but still in use after the report), but it took a while.