(Ninja M.)
Before leaving the country, Fermin left his Blackberry on his table along with some junk mail. His mother came over while he was gone to clean up, and swept up the phone along with the junk mail and tossed it. Someone found it in the garbage and used it to make $6,000 in fraudulent calls. Fermin negotiated with T-Mobile to pay $2,000, then they changed their minds without notice and decide to hold him on the hook for $4,000. What’s a consumer to do?
Fermin writes:
While I was out of the country on a vacation in the beginning of July I left my blackberry at home with its battery removed and the case popped on top of my dining table along with some junk mail I had picked up from my mail box at the last minute. While I was out my mother came over to do some cleaning and she threw swept all the junk mail along with my cellphone into the trash and threw it out. Apparently someone found the cellphone and proceeded to make over $6000 worth of long distance calls.T Mobile let this go on until it passed the $6000 mark before suspending service to the phone. So upon returning from vacation I was presented with this nightmarish bill from Tmobile for a phone I had lost and calls I could have never made. I have made several calls to Tmobile, they have a special department ( High Balance Department ) which is not tended by customer service reps but some kind of specially trained employees that are only there to get you to pay. After several different calls I got my issue escalated to a supervisor. After discussing the situation with this supervisor for a while he offered me a settlement of 10 payments of $200 to settle the debt. I reluctantly agreed as I had no other parent options, not paying this bill would ruin my carefully cared for credit history.
After I finished with the supervisor, I went up to my PC and checked my account balance and it was at the agreed $2000 mark. Today I went to make my first payment and found that my account balance had been raised up to $4000 without notice and when I tried calling that same number all I got was another rep that said I would have to pay the first $2000 before I could enter into the agreed 10 payments of $200.
I have not missed a payment on anything on my entire life, my credit record is flawless. But T-Mobile first let my account run to stratospheric heights and now is holding my credit history ransom . I have done some research as you can imagine, and there is no federal law that makes telecoms put a hard cap on what an account can run to before notifying the owner or suspending the account. So I find myself without a cellphone, a $6000 bill and my financial future on jeopardy because of some predatory tactic T-Mobile employs and the FCC not doing anything about it.
I really dont know what to do, I dont have the money to pay, I cant buy a new cellphone and activate a line as long as I have to be paying for this. Im so scared my credit history will be ruined for a decade or more. I really could use any help I can get.
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Section 16 of the T-Mobile terms and conditions states that it is your responsibility to report your phone lost or stolen. Any calls/data/etc used between the time of loss and the time you report it lost are considered to be authorized charges and you would likely be responsible for them.
They’re not going to be able to know whether she really did or didn’t throw the phone away, people do stupid stuff all of the time (and lie equally as often) so they usually give you the benefit of the doubt, and even though you are responsible for 100 percent of the charges, they meet you halfway or so.
Like it’s been said T-Mobile and AT&T phones can lock at the phone level, or for added security the SIM level, rendering it impossible for a thief to use your service. So even at this point if you are dumb enough to throw it away and not report it for who knows how long, you at least won’t get screwed with charges.
Read section 16 if interested:
http://www.t-mobile.com/Templates/Popup.aspx?WT.z_unav=ftr__TC&PAsset=Ftr_Ftr_TermsAndConditions&print=true
This story is complete BS. You didn’t leave it behind, your mom didn’t throw it away, someone didn’t find it at the dump and run up all of those calls.
When I bought my then 16-year-old daughter a cell phone from Sprint (on the family plan) a couple of years ago, I specifically told them that she was to have NO texting capability because at the time it cost to send each individual text cost money. They were supposed to have disabled texting from her phone at the point of purchase. The first month I didn’t notice any difference in the phone bill, but the next month, apparently, some of her friends started texting her and she found that she did have the ability to text and be texted to. She THOUGHT she had found a loophole. WRONG! The very next month she managed to ring up over $900 worth of texts. I took this up with T-mobile, but nothing. They wanted every single penny of the $900. I admit that my daughter was in the wrong once she found out she could text, but come on T-mobile cut me a little slack – That’s a house payment!
Oops, that was T-mobile that I had the contract with at the time. I have since switched to Sprint. Sorry for the confusion.
What is forgotten is that you have the phone number of everyone called by the person who stole the phone and used it. They can be fucked with if needed to provide the information of who was calling them on a certain day or time. If they say some lie like “I don’t know” then ask them how they can have long conversations over multiple calls. You can sue and compel the recipients of illegal calls made from your phone.
You have the phone number of anyone called from your phone. It should be no problem to get the information about each person who was called. Think of of it like a reverse class action.
Yeah, it is a bit of a pain to work the system but usually you can get the information you need to take care of business.
Not sure why the dude agreed to the $2000 in the first place, wouldn’t a better course of action to have been reported it stolen and then protested the fraudulent charges?
Genius.
You have your own place and your mother is cleaning up after you? Who piled the junk mail on top of your phone? Why are you not shredding? Well I don’t think you deserve to suffer this problem I can see how it happened. Get a lawyer. And don’t let your mother clean your house, regardless of where you are.
I don’t see why T-Mobile have to take the hit either. It’s not their fault.
You have your own place and your mother is cleaning up after you? Who piled the junk mail on top of your phone? Why are you not shredding? Well I don’t think you deserve to suffer this problem I can see how it happened. Get a lawyer. And don’t let your mother clean your house, regardless of where you are.
You have your own place and your mother is cleaning up after you? Who piled the junk mail on top of your phone? Why are you not shredding? Well I don’t think you deserve to suffer this problem I can see how it happened. Get a lawyer. And don’t let your mother clean your house, regardless of where you are.
You have your mother coming over to clean for you while you’re away. You’ve got more problems than a lost cell phone.
Ever thought of locking/disabling your phone while you’re away?
How does he know that his mother threw it out? That is just supposition. She remembers throwing it out? “Oh yes, that black thing with the screen and lots of little buttons – I threw it out”
Someone rifled through his garbage and found it? Again, supposition.
If I were the OP I’d track down the user (check the phone log & GPS- if available), take your evidence to the police, and sue in small claims court. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was someone he knows through 3 degrees of separation.
Did she take out the trash as well? She had to have I think. I can’t imagine the OP didn’t look for his cell before doing that when he returned. I would hope the trashcans would be emptied before you take a trip overseas. Why would the trash be filled up already when you got back to town?
Too many holes in this story for me.
I’m a former employee with T-mobile’s fraud department (Risk Assessment) The big problem with this situation is that T-mobile has a loophole in the rules that states if you do not report your phone as lost or stolen, you are responsible for any charges up to the point that T-Mobile is notified.
You may have a SMALL chance to rectify this with T-Mo by calling the Risk assessment department. If they can determine that none of the calls that were made have any connection to your normal account activity (i.e. the person wasn’t calling your friends or family, in which case it would be considered a “relationship” issue), they may decide that you aren’t responsible for the charges.
Hope this helps.
Erm… the plane tickets and stuff would deffinatly help in making a great argument, but I’m pretty sure his mum already threw them out in the trash right???
I don’t understand. You aren’t liable for whatever some thief does with something he steals, whether it be your car, your gun, your phone… So why doesn’t this guy simply pay a lawyer (is so simple it would probably cost only a couple hundred dollars of lawyer-time) to point out to T-m that he wasn’t even in the country, therefore there is no way they can make him liable.
Although I’m not an attorney, the fact the “T Mobile let this go on until it (the fraudulent charges) passed the $6000 mark” might offer you one line of defense should they sue for the full amount. A plaintiff has a duty to mitigate damages, and cannot recover losses it could have avoided through reasonable efforts. So if my garden hose leaks into your basement and it’s my fault, you still can’t wait until the water rises to the ceiling and all your furniture is destroyed, just because you’d like me to pay for new furniture — not if you could have limited the damage through reasonable efforts. The question is whether it was reasonable in this situation for T Mobile to allow $6,000 worth of charges, before investigating or take some other action that would have cut its — and/or your — losses. A point worth arguing, I’d say.
You could take take all the numbers called and publish them on the internet.
Yeah – for a good time call 202-456-7890.
Backtrack who took the phone. I for one would harass the people whose numbers were called in to telling you who called them.
T-Mobile is a german company. There is a big cultural gap. Over there, if you are an adult, you are treated as an adult and you take the responsibility for your action. If something goes wrong on your side of the contract, you have to pay for it.
They dont have warning labels on theier hotel windows saying “Dont jump out, the height is heigher than it seems”
Actual is the natural way to weed the biggest idiots out of the breeding cycle.
So maybe think about joining the world adulthood and pay for the damage you or your family caused.
( By the way, your parents sure spend more than 6000 $ on raising you )
yea make ur mother pay, it was her stupid actions. shes not supposed to be in ur crib ur a big boy now lol. how dumb is it to toss a phone out. i hope she feels good about this. and tech.. it was lost and or stolen so ur not responsible for any of it. how could u throw a cell phone away on accident? there not small like change or anything. hmm
the story is SO phony – if YOU had six thousand dollars in fraudulent calls charged to your account allegedly made by strangers to strangers – why would YOU offer to pay a full third of those fraudulent charges for ANY reason … ?
First order of business: Slap mom.
(i keed, of course)
The OP would be responsible for calls made up until the point the phone was reported lost or stolen. Though he was out of the country, he could have given his phone to a friend and that friend racked up all those calls. There’s no way for T-Mobile to tell.
Maybe the mom didn’t throw out the phone and was the one who made all those calls? (I’m being facetious, of course).
Not sure if laws are the same everywhere regarding garbage, but I thought that people cannot take things out of other people’s trash cans? Isn’t it considered city property?
Sounds familiar. 6 years ago I switched to Tmobile. I bought my plan from a Cellphone vendor across the street from LACC in Los Angeles and had good service immedietly. Three months I went without recieving a bill from them and as I called their customer service line multiple times I was told this was normal. When I finally received my bill it was for $4000 for calls made to Cuba. When I told them there was no way I made those calls I was told I was still responsible. A lawyer friend told me they were right and what happened was my
phone was cloned the moment my service was activated and this was normal. Good luck. They raped my credit anyway.
Sue in small claims for a declaratory judgment that you don’t owe the debt. Subpoena T-Mobile’s cell tower records to help establish that the calls were made while you were out of country. Also provide proof of your travels. As these things only will provide circumstantial evidence, make sure you dress well for court and speak politely and respectfully to the Judge. Credibility will go a long way toward winning your case.
Why is your mother still cleaning up after you? She needs to recognize your boundaries and that you are a grown up now! Really, now dispute all charges with T-Mobile and then find another phone company to do business with.
There’s something wrong with this story. How would Mom know the mail is junk mail without looking at each piece? If she did look, she would have found the Blackberry. If she didn’t look at the mail and just threw it all away, how did she know it was junk mail? See the paradox here?
I work for Sprint and we have a dedicated fraud dept. to investigate these kind of incidences. We would have quickly determined call pattern and found the customer wasn’t anywhere near his phone while the charges were incurred, as well as the usage difference. Having said that…first things first…TAKE THE KEYS FROM MOM AND HIRE A MAID!!! You’re old enuff to be responsible for your own housework!
As much as I hate Verizon, for so many reasons, their TOS states ‘if we determine that the calls are fraudulent, you will not be responsible for them”.
Just pay them in layers, trident layers.
I am so sorry to hear this has happened. You are going to have to sue as mentioned. You may not have to go to court because corporations play a numbers game. Tell everyone no! Then the people who take the time to file court papers, settle out of court with them. In court, they could lose and you not have to pay anything. Or they may go to court and try to settle while in court. There is a reason they do not have a cap. So they can do this. If they capped it off at say $500.00 then that is the most they will ever collect. Let it ride to $6000.00 then that is the most people might pay. Notice how they were willing to go to $4000.00 Start high like a used car salesman. They likely have insurance among other things and it did not cost them $6000.00 That is simply what they charged you. Besides. It’s fraud. It is not like a bankcard in which the bank actually has to eat the fraud. (Although they have insurance too and other tactics.) The bank would never let that happen. For T-mobile it is all gravy as it were. Get a lawyer. Then T-mobile will take you seriously. Don’t just tell them you have a lawyer. That means nothing. File the papers. Try to get some media attention as well. You tube twitter etc. Be careful. Corporations don’t like it when you tell the truth about them and will sue you for deformation of character. Yes. For telling the truth. They don’t expect to win, just put fear in the hearts of consumers. Get a lawyer. Before they trash your credit history. Again, I am so sorry to hear this. You are not the first and certainly will not be the last. This is the new playing field.