When a Time Warner Cable customer complained that she hadn’t ordered the $154.65 worth of pay-per-view porn on her cable bill, the company blamed everyone else — including Motorola, the manufacturer of the customer’s cable box — for the error.

The customer, who says she has never ordered a pay-per-view porn, tells her story to the L.A. Times’ David Lazarus.

According to her bill, TWC claimed she had ordered 17 porn flicks in just a four-day period. Making the orders even more suspect were the times at which the flesh films were allegedly ordered.

The first day, movies were ordered at 9:55 a.m., 9:57, 10:03, 10:04, 10:05 and 10:06. Two days her cable bill shows porn ordered at 10:39 a.m., 10:40, 2 p.m., and 2:01. At 2:03 and 2:04 p.m. on that day, a total of four movies were ordered.

Concerned about this rather obvious error, the customer called TWC, where she was met with the expected stonewall from customer service.

“He told me they don’t make mistakes,” the woman says. “He said I must have watched all those movies.”

She tells Lazarus that she doesn’t understand why credit cards will contact you when they see a sudden pattern of mysterious charges, but Time Warner Cable will insist that you did indeed order a mountain of porn when you have no history of doing so in the past.

TWC told the woman that if she didn’t order the films, then someone in her house must have. Both the contractor building her outside patio and her part-time housekeeper denied any part in the pornopalooza.

When Lazarus tried to get an explanation from TWC, a company rep played the customer privacy card.

“We take customer privacy seriously, which we know our customers appreciate, and as such we are not able to comment on a particular customer’s account,” the robo-rep stated, presumably while praying to someday become a real boy.

After Lazarus contacted TWC, the customer received multiple calls from the company, all with different opinions on the matter:

Two service reps have insisted that the porn orders were legitimate and must have been made from inside the house, she said. Two others have said it’s possible an electrical short caused the funny orders, or that perhaps [her] cable account was hacked from elsewhere.

So when Lazarus went back to the company rep to ask about the possibility of a hacked cable box. The rep said to take such questions to Motorola, which only commented that its “set-top security is unsurpassed.”

In the end, TWC erased the porn from the customer’s bill and set up filters so that adult content could not be ordered from her account.

Given the sheer amount of free erotica available on the Internet, we don’t even know why someone would go through the hassle of hacking a cable box in the first place.

A bill for 17 porn films in 4 days? Now that’s obscene [L.A. Times]

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