Time Warner wants reader Nancy, a 60-year-old English teacher, to pay $1,400 for ordering porn—including 17 flicks supposedly viewed on a single day. Nancy didn’t order the porn, and has no clue how the charges were associated with her cable box, but one useless Time Warner representative suggested: “maybe your dog ordered them.”
Nancy writes:
Time Warner is charging me for movie purchases which I have not ordered. My current bill is 1400.30. The overwhelming majority of these movies are pornographic. My bill informs me that among many others, 17 were ordered on May 8 and 14 were ordered on May 10. Time Warner says it is impossible (their word) that these movies were NOT ordered from inside my house using my remote control and my cable box. I am a 60-year old English teacher. I have never seen a porn movie in my life. I LIVE ALONE. No one else has access to my house when I am a work. My husband who works out of another state is helping me in an effort to rectify this mess.
So far, we have been through the telephone drill (on hold, rude customer service clerks), a 90-minute visit to my local cable company where I was told that “maybe your dog ordered them,” a phone call to the Time Warner CEO’s office in Connecticut (national, not district) where I talked with a Customer Relations rep, a call from a Customer Care rep at district level, etc. None of this has helped. I was told at every level that the only way known to man that these movies could have been ordered is from inside my house using my equipment. I am 100% certain that they haven’t been ordered from my house.
It looks like I’m going to have to swear to that under oath in court because my husband and I have agreed that we will not pay for these movies (52 movies since 4/21, most of them costing $11.99 — I didn’t even know there were on demand movies that cost $11.99). Though I have been researching this problem for hours and hours and have seen comments from others being charged for movies they say they didn’t order, I have not seen anyone with a problem with Time Warner of this magnitude. Can you think of any possible way this could have happened?
17 porn flicks in one day? We’re young. We’re ambitious. But that’s too much—by far—even for us.
Nancy’s situation calls for a dose of common sense, which means executive customer support. Call Jeff Simmermon, Time Warner’s Digital Communications Director, at (203) 351-2221, and see if he can’t help wipe off those misfired charges.
(Photo: Getty)
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From working at the bank AND at dish network, if you ask if they have had a teenage visitor recently or one lives in the house, they go…’oh. ohhhhhhhhh’ and then realize someone in the house DID order it. This kind of stuff doesn’t usually happen on accident.
Darn Gnomes
I would think the first step would be to lock up the cable reciever somewhere with witnesses and see if the charges keep coming with the box out of the house.
It’s not that farfetched.
Amazingly enough, the same thing happened to me & my husband and we came to the conclusion that someone had stolen our MAC address – we had charges on days we were out of town, and no one had our keys. We’d also have charges at times when we both left for work, and the charges would be several hours apart, like 8 AM, 11 AM and 1 PM.
It was a ridiculous struggle to get the money refunded, but we finally got it.