XM-Sirius Merger Will Double Monthly Prices?

This is strictly confidential, but all the paperwork is signed and ready to go, and XM has fully acquired Sirius Radio. Come May, there will be a substantial price increase for XM Radio, as it will, in June or so, host all the Sirius channels. It would be best to simply extend your XM plan as we will honor your current contract price per month before we begin hosting the Sirius stations.

A mysterious letter was anonymously faxed to our headquarters by a self-described "disgusted" Verizon customer service rep angry at how he/she says Verizon is screwing over landline customers. Here's the highlights of his gut-spilling:

• 30,000+ people nationwide have still not received the free HDTVs Verizon promised new FiOS triple-play subscribers
• Verizon totally screwed up the "blitz" promotion, leading some customers signing up and not getting their discounts, others getting too much discount, and others not getting their discount for months
• Employees issued over $1 million in credit in January '08, double what was given out in Jan '07
• $250 in discretionary credit has been reduced to $50
• Internally, Verizon refers to customer service reps who give out "too much" credit due are called "offenders."

If his allegations are true, they could prove fodder for the NJ AG's office.

Full letter scan, inside...

Ever wonder why gadget store employees push Monster cables like they're crack? Bitchin' markups, just like you suspected (or knew) all along. That's what we found when a Radio Shack employee sent us his store's entire inventory list, which included the wholesale and retail price of every item in stock.

UPDATE: Monster Responds To "Monster Cables, Monster Ripoff" Story

"...a customer would be qualified for a loan because their credit score and other factors based on the written product description, however, when I went in to put their (this only happened to African-Americans) - they were not qualified for the loan product and had to be referred to Countrywide's subprime mortgage company Full Spectrum. Full Spectrum offered higher rates and fees. I got wise one day and started not inputing the race so the computer could give me "approval."

Exclusive: CompUSA's Tentative Liquidation Schedule

After reading "How Geek Squad Investigated Its Own Porn Thieves," another fired Geek Squad tech has chimed in to tell us how the internal witch hunt for porn thieves proceeded.

I had worked for Geek Squad for over a year, and Best Buy a year and a half before that and was recently let go. Back when they started scanning computers, they said they found downloaded music and movies on our machine and we were to send them the hard drives. So we boxed them up and sent them out.

A month or so later the interrogations happened. We all had our turn, and when it was mine, I walked into a room with the table pushed against the wall and two chairs in the middle of the room sitting two feet apart with nothing in between.

The start of the internal Geek Squad investigation began this summer as all of the locations throughout the country were entered through remote connection and scanned for violations. The Geek Squad "precincts" that had bench machines containing serious violations had their hard drives removed and shipped to the corporate office. All of this was done rapidly and under the watchful eye of salary managers who had their jobs threatened if this was not executed properly. My store was lucky enough to have scored well enough on the remote scans to keep our hard drives. I knew at this point that there was serious cause for concern if Best Buy was willing to spend the kind of cash necessary to execute remote scans throughout ALL of its stores in one day.

Tmobile Introduces $18 Phone Upgrade Fee

Starting today, Tmobile will charge existing customers $18 when they buy a new phone. In an email shared with The Consumerist by an inside source, Tmobile told dealers that the new fee will help underwrite the cost of selling subsidized phones to new customers. Tmobile told dealers that acting positive when mentioning the fee would help to discourage customers from raising objections. Oddly enough, if an existing customer upgrades their phone without extending their contract, the fee will not be assessed.

Maybe they could further offset costs by charging people every time they use magenta.

(Photo: JD Pavkovich)

Comcast Mole Starts Blog

The Comcast insider who leaked the BitTorrent memo promises to tell all of Comcast's dark secrets at Shortnamenowitsgettinglong.com.

"I am just trying to help spread the truth about how screwed up Comcast is," the insider writes in their first post. "I am not trying to hurt Comcast's reputation or bad talk them, I think they do a good enough job themselves...You will find a lot of good information here. The information you want to see as a consumer and they don't."

We'll be watching, and Comcast will as well.

Inside Comcast
(Photo: cmorran123)

Comcast's Download Cap Is 200 GB, But Only In Areas With Subpar Networks

Comcast's download limit is 200 gigabytes, but the limit isn't everywhere, a former Comcast employee told The Consumerist. Places where the network isn't optimal, due to old hardware or too much traffic, like the Bay Area, will run into the limit. Places like Philadelphia will never run into the problem.

Comcast even has a system ready to go where if you exceed the limit a popup will ask you to purchase additional gigabytes, our source says. The graphical user interface is completely designed and everything, but Comcast hasn't deployed it, because they're waiting for either another ISP to do it first, or to figure out how to do it without angering their customers, whichever comes first.

CEO Brian Roberts is said to have seen a demo and given his thumbs up.

RELATED: Comcast Customer Uses "Unlimited Service" Excessively, Gets Disconnected For A Year
(Photo: cmorran123)

Looks like we got our hands on a big ol' list of Comcast contacts for every single regional division. Names and numbers listed under "Sched Install," "Complete Install," "Reschedule Install," "Billing Adjustments," "Escalation Contact," and "Retention "save" disco's" would seem to be of particular interest to consumers trying to escalate issues through the notoriously unresponsive and uncaring cable company.

According to the datestamp embedded in the files' titles, these are up to date as of 8/27/07.

For those who don't know, Retentions refers to the group in the company tasked with throwing rebates, refunds and additional services at customers to prevent them from switching to another provider.

East Division (XLS)
MidWest Division (XLS)
North Division (XLS)
West Division (XLS)
Southern Division (XLS)

It's telling how bad things on when they have a whole department just for rescheduling installations.

(Photo: Getty)

In today's go-go economy, savvy companies know it's important to draft official policies for a variety of circumstances and surprises that can crop up in the middle of a busy workday, clearly communicated and readily available.

There need to be documents employees can refer to, pantra-laterally, to help steer their decisions through times of uncertainty and deal with rapidly fluxing global business enterprise environment.

Like when you need to change the water jug.

Inside, Comcast's official water jug changing policy and instruction manual...