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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Maybe the dingo ordered them.
Them saying it’s impossible just shows how out of touch with technology they are. Anything can be done with technology, just look at the last couple of bogus elections.
Anyway, Direct TV almost got me in trouble with my soon-wife when she was charged with a porn we didn’t order. She explained nobody was home and they refunded her $5 at a time on a few bills. CONVERSELY, she has only ever ordered one movie (non-porn) and was never charged for it.
Yet they think their system is fool proof, hack proof, mistake proof.
“Anything can be done with technology, just look at the last couple of bogus elections.”
@AgentTuttle: I agree. There’s no way the Democrats had that many votes. Their just dipping back into the old Joe Kennedy days and rigging elections.
As for all the age-related comments:
C’mon if a 52 year old is buying crotchless panties as Victoria’s Secret, why not a 60 year old addicted to porn? Her husband’s gone… she gets lonely… she breaks out the rabbit.
I can’t BELIEVE no one brought up the thong suit.
I think a more plausible story is someone figured out how to hack a box that happens to have her serial number, though. But maybe not.
Assuming a 90 minute film and 17 * 90 is 1530 minutes. There are only 1440 minutes in a day. There is no way to order and watch that many films in a day. Period.
CyberSkull: I was thinking the same thing. Sounds like to me that some numbers have been crossed and someone else kept ordering movies because the first ones ordered did not show up.
Would love to know how this gets resolved.
Happened to me with Dish Network for one movie. First they denied my claim to cancel the charge, then I asked to cancel the service, at which time they canceled the charge. I still canceled the service. I am not a 60 year old female English teacher, but the porn did not match my sexual orientation. I would have offered to take a brain stimulation test to prove it, but it was not offered…Still, all our lives are now wrapped around our credit HISTORY. The credit card companies track every purchase and every late payment. They should also set up a porn history profile. If the teacher does not have a history of porn watching then it is unlikely that she would overdose in one day…
@CyberSkull: A friend of mine is the director of engineering for a Time Warner market, and one of the things under his authority is the video-on-demand system. I can’t remember the exact number, but he told me that the average viewing time for VOD porn is under 10 minutes. The actual run time of the show has no bearing on the time spent viewing it.
@Caveat: Because if someone never bought porn until that day, they clearly never saw or had an interest in it?
It sounds like a lot of conditionals in here that have nothing to do with anything. “she’s 60, she teaches english, etc”
And honestly I kinda found it funny that they told an ENGLISH TEACHER that “THE DOG WATCHED/ATE IT” – I can’t be the only one who sees the humor in that.
If it were seventeen movies in three mounths, I’d doubt her.
But seventeen movies in a day? What sort of morons do they have to be not to admit that they (no pun) fucked up? Or are they making their own rape fantasy porn where they screw the customers?
@Amy Alkon: That’s because male sexuality is far more visually-driven than female sexuality (and I say that as somebody who’s written — don’t laugh — scholarly articles for Hustler on the topic).
As someone who has also written (and photographed!) for such publications, I respectfully disagree. ‘Tis a myth that females are not “visually-driven.” All of my female sex industry workers, writers, and authorities will agree with me hands down.
This happened to me with BrightHouse in Florida. During the hurricanes in 2004, we were without power for 2 weeks. We left town and drove up north to visit family. When we came back we still had no power for another week. The next cable bill were were charged over 900 dollars for repeated porn charges on the account, all during the power outage. BH STILL wouldn’t remove the charges until an employee friend got their supervisor to credit us, being as we had proof the box was off. We still ended up paying 300 of it to close the account. They told us that the charges came from OUR REMOTE, so apparently, they wanted us to believe that someone had taken our remote out of our apartment, used it on their cable box, then broke back into our apartment, put it back, and re-locked the place before we got back…
* female friends in these fields
this happened to Hank Hill. he cleared his name by watching hours and hours of porn. she should do the same.
She should make them check the IP of the box that actually ordered the product.
I am not in any way in that sleezy profession of cable companies. I do profess.
I am just used to the crap that T_W deals out.Each and every box you rent has it’s own IP and is provisioned to your account.
Make the provider prove beyond verbal, that it was actually ordered from that set top network provisioned box. Or more than one network provisioned box.
Got to love netowrk logs.
@CyberSkull: she does what i do – fast forwards through the talk an foreplay to the good stuff
@GearheadGeek: 10 minutes per movie? does that really sound possible?
Its not like the cable company has lost a tangible product that can’t be replaced or diminishes its inventory. Give the lady a break.
@choinski:
Actually, the cable company has to pay the PPV company for each time the movie is viewed. So if they credit back the whole charge, they actually lose money.
@betadan:
How the heck does that happen? Something weird with an attached IR blaster?
I work for a particular cable giant… maybe even the one in question, but not in her area. I’ve seen this happen a few times before. Sometimes it winds up good, sometimes it winds up at corporate. From my experience, I’ve never once seen a ppv/mod charged to an account that wasn’t ordered from a customers cable box. Each box has a specific MAC address assigned to it which is how we can view the customers purchases. We use this data to see how often its viewed, rewinded, paused, fast forwarded, etc, but only for On Demand services since is a two-way system. If you were to ask me, either someone is sneaking into her house or someone is running a secondary business. And I’ve had many lil’ old ladies call in to make 2k dollar payments. Why? They make a lot more reselling than they do off social security. I’m not saying thats whats happening, but it is a possibility.
By the way, corporate escalations is: 866-563-6312 if it helps any.
I used to live in a house where the TV would turn itself on every afternoon. It turns out it was a sunbeam hitting the IR sensor, but it drove me nuts trying to figure out what was happening until I finally saw this.
Not a big stretch to think something similar is going on here.
@Pylon83: This is assuming that the movie was actually viewed. If the lady didn’t actually watch the movie and nobody else did either (assuming some sort of billing error here), then I don’t really see why TW would have to pay anyone either.
ummh, 60? alone! gotta be doing something more than reading those boring English books. Dealing w/min wage telephone answering people is not going to correct the issue. I say get one of those sleezy TV lawyers and let “THE STRONG ARM” sue them for mental stress.
Sasha_Pie nailed it, either the mac address of this customer’s box is actually in another customer’s home (like if the installer scanned the wrong box out of their truck to this customer, and installed that box somewhere else, which is really unlikely because it would have been caught when they tried to install that other box and found it already on an account) or a visitor ordered them. The visitor is of course usually an angelic 13 year old boy who would never do anything like that, but I guess a maintenance guy with a key could do it too. The system is 100% infallible as long as the mac address on the account is correct. The pickle that the cable company is in when people dispute these bills is that the programming providers know that the system is 100% reliable, and they expect payment regardless of whether the customer pays or not, and Playboy or Spice’s cut of that $1,400 is a pretty big chunk of cash.
I have found that Time Warner responds well to complaints to the Public Service Commission.
@mikelotus: Most people aren’t watching porn for the plot, nor do they really want to have a marathon beat-off session. It sounds pretty reasonable for someone to only watch the fun parts of a porn and fast forward to just the part they want to wank to.
They’re not going to really care about the pre interview or the credits at the start or if the guy playing the repair man is out to fix pipes or the cable box.
The thing is, if every subscriber had to punch in a DOB (default) or another password before a PPV would play, this couldn’t have happened.
Of course, they want the rubes to order without thought, so they don’t do this.
Great. So take their lumps now. Seems fair, since TWC didn’t put any safeguards in.
You’d be surprised at how many customers are upset over the default 0000 pin code that is on most newer cable boxes.
There is some personal responsibility though. If every customer would put a pin on their boxes we wouldn’t have this problem. However, lets enjoy the fact its given us a few chuckles today.
For that much money, I could hire a prostitute and make my own porn. Hahahahah
It does not matter if she did it or not. She is responsible for the charges.
@Doug Nelson: It’s a big stretch to think that a sunbeam is sending a signal to the cable box that a) turns it on, b) select video-on-demand, c) chooses the adult section, d) selects a movie, and e) confirms the order of the movie.
Don’t those cable boxes have a private IP address that the provider can use to send reset signals to and such? Why not have her unplug the cable box and see what does/doesn’t drop off the grid to prove whether the videos were ordered from her house or not. If the company’s documentation is right then it’s an open and shut thing imo.
@mikelotus: I don’t know what you think is impossible or even unlikely about the 10-minute thing. Start movie, fast-forward to naughty bits, get off, turn off the TV and go clean up. My friend who’s the director of engineering is quite smart, knows how his VoD system works, and wouldn’t lie to me. I believe the 10-minute average. Why don’t you? Do you watch porn for the dialogue?
“…see if he can’t help wipe off those misfired charges.”
And I see what you did there.
@Amy Alkon: I don’t think you should generalize. A lot more women like porn than would ever admit to it and not just to watch with our husbands/significant others. But that discussion probably belongs on Jezebel.
@jackspat2:
For that much $ spent on a pro…. she better stay a whole week and wash my windows and floors during her free time.
Funny story:
My friend was telling me about her husband’s experience with ambien this past week. (hang on, it relates)
He got hungry after taking the pill, so went to make a PB sandwich. Somewhere in the sandwich making process the pill kicked in. He did a bunch of weird stuff, including ordering a PPV porn which he watched exactly one minute of (as shown on their bill).
Anybody in the house taking a prescription sleep aid?
@GearheadGeek: Oh sorry, I did not realize there was quick squirting teenage boys on here.
@mikelotus: Really?
Sometimes when no one is around to impress, you just want to get in, get out, and be done. I know how I like it, 10 minutes if I was already inclined, probably not unheard of.
This is probably what happened, my younger brother did the same thing once: She was looking at the different titles, going in to check the descriptions, and ordering them, but not starting them. With TW you have to start a movie after you order it, and I’m betting the menu might have been a little confusing to a “60 year old English teacher”. She probably kept thinking she was gonna get to watch one, and when it didn’t work, moved on to another title, to do it again and again, until giving up in frustration because old people can’t understand technology
I have absolutely no experience with US cable boxes, but the systems we use here with subscriber-based satellite service could quite possibly be scammed. It is possible to make a clone of the subscriber card which contains the information from which billing associations are made.
Someone mentioned MAC address as the way the cable VOD and billing services are managed, which would make sense. If that’s the case then I’m almost certain it would be possible to clone/fake a MAC address on a decoder. I worked for an ISP once that did a MAC address controlled delivery system and it was definitely possible to clone an approved MAC address to get free service.
Also repeated billings for the same title just screams accounting error to me. That some sort of unusual error in the type, content or format of requests or communications for her cable box is causing errors or unexpected conditions in the billing system.
@MageSeer: Why would she complain ANONYMOUSLY to Consumerist if she actually was buying the porn and tell them she was going to take it to court?
Someone stole her MAC address, maybe through network sniffing. Is it really that hard to believe?
@cashmerewhore: If so then the makers of that FrankenPill should pay the freaken charges.
Reminds me of when I was a kid and ordered a porn. Knowing my parents would kill me, I had a plan to order every single porn for the next week, so they would automatically assume it’s a glitch.
Guess what? It worked!
Firstly, let me get this out of the way:
No, I don’t think the sixty-year-old schoolmarm did it. Not because of her age or gender or because she morally couldn’t have, but because she probably wasn’t home. And I think we all know her dog didn’t order it.
Now onto the other issue that has, thanks to Amy Alkon, herein arisen. No pun intended:
I am a girl. Yes, I am cute. I am also straight, which I reveal only to indicate my averageness in this regard. I am also, despite being all of the above, extremely visually-oriented, and thus a mere visual whiff of something that’s sexual (limited to the all-human variety, admittedly), and I become aroused. Doesn’t matter if it’s “traditional” porn, Skinamax, lesbian/girl² porn, it hits that part of my brain and beyond my own control, wham, there you have it. And, forgive me for getting too personal here, but to stress to what level this is true: I’ve climaxed merely WATCHING porn. Same with reading erotica. Yep, same with hentai. And yes, even I was surprised the first time this happened. So watching the so-called nasty-nasty, or visualizing it mentally, allows me to cruise hands-free. Rare? So I’ve heard. Impossible for others? I doubt it.
And no, all you other histrionic arm-chair (or degree-holding) psychologists of the intertubes, I was never sexually exploited as a youngster, had no dirty uncles living nearby, etc. Didn’t even play “doctor” with the boy next door. Depressingly normal development all around, although I wouldn’t claim my conditioning was of the average variety, as I was raised to view neither the human body/sexuality, nor sexual acts, as obscene. To me, my pre-adolescent body just was, and I carried that neutrality into my adulthood. It was stressed that sex was neither morally good nor bad, and in practice, I was told, it could be either, and what I made of it personally was entirely up to me. Foremost though, I was taught it was human and natural and interesting and to be experienced, to my own accord. So fitted with this viewpoint, I even waited a while to have sex (yes, past the high-end of average first-time age), not because of fear as instilled by church or parents, or the guilt associated with going against the wishes of both or either, but entirely because of the complications I’d witnessed youthful sex inject into my partaking peer’s lives. This is, of course, where porn came in especially handy: it’s hard to get knocked up, or the clap, by/from yourself. But I digress.
Being intrigued as I am by sexuality, I have had countless conversations with other woman who will admit, in confidence, to having similar (if less intense, but sometimes not by much) responses to sexual images. The fact that they often also express that they are uncomfortable with these responses, and flat-out say the images and their own responses to them disgust them, as well as that they know, or were brought up to believe, that it’s wrong for them to respond this way, causes me to suggest the obvious: that girls -at least the ones of my Y generation and older- unlike boys, were/are conditioned by parents and society to “look away” and repress such responses and impulses, lest they risk feeling guilt and/or shame, or even social punishment, for not doing so. Anecdotal as this evidence is, it’s telling. Negative emotions don’t exactly make me feel great in the sack, so I can see why for many women fitted with THIS viewpoint, porn’s a flat-out turn off.
Perhaps the resulting date of these studies is actually more indicative of this fairly ubiquitous and systematically-induced emotional malaise amongst the female population regarding sex and sexuality, (as well as of the underlying mores held by those doing the interpreting) than of the “fact” that women are simply not physically/neurologically able to be physically aroused by visual images.
@Avery: Someone stole her MAC address, maybe through network sniffing. Is it really that hard to believe?
Yes, it is. IIRC, Time Warner uses Scientific Atlanta model converters and DVRs. These boxes, because of some court ruling years back, have an M (two way) cable card in them which acts as seperable security. These cards are unmarked and physically sealed into the slot on the back of the converter. As such it is damn near impossible to pull the MAC off of it, let alone the serial number, bound IP and pairing data required to allow it to sync to the network. Second, the converter itself has a serial number which is paired to the converter, then bound to the IP address assigned to the box. IF! you can spoof all of that on the network, then yea, you can fake it.
Occam’s razor folks. Is it some sneaky bastard spoofing two devices, two IPs, and ordering this stuff? Possible, yes. Likely? No. Is it some sneaky bastard watching porn, racking up charges and not telling momma? Possible, yes. Likely, yes.
“Alright, fess up! You know you slipped into a nice pair of leather thigh high boots. Strapped on a matching leather strapless bra. Sipped some more peach rum, then grabbed your whip, sat down with your remote control determined to watch as much smut as your heart could take. Didnt you? DIDN’T YOU!!!!” a Time Warner Customer Service rep.
So many commenters reporting that this happens a LOT — teenagers gaining access and running up $1000 TW bills.
Seems like a good gig for TW: Entice 15 year olds with the stuff they can’t resist. Then get law enforcement to make you pay the $1400 bill. For them, no need for normal due diligence businesses should do before selling you $1400 worth of goods. “Grammy said you could buy $1400 of (baseball cards, chewing gum, Vicodin) and charge it to her? Here ya go!”
This is why I put a block on the PPV channels on all of our cable boxes, not just the one for the kids. You have to enter a PIN to order anything.
She should be given a volume discount at the very least.