FedEx Employee Says Company Knew It Was Overcharging Customers, Didn’t Care

As part of a class action lawsuit alleging that FedEx has been overcharging its business and government customers for years, an unsealed email from an employee claims that not only did the company know it was doing so, it even overcharged itself for sending packages to its own headquarters. Go on, shake your head in disbelief.

The employee’s emails were added to an amendment of a class action lawsuit first brought against FedEx in 2011, and claims that the company has been “systematically overcharging” customers by billing businesses and government offices at the higher residential rates, reports Bloomberg News.

“I have brought this to attention of many people over the past five or six years, including more than one managing director, and no action has been taken to address it,” the company sales executive wrote in one email. “My belief is that we are choosing not to fix this issue because it is worth so much money to FedEx,” he said in another.

The plaintiffs say FedEx overcharged by as much as $3 each for millions of packages, and are seeking three times the amount of the alleged overcharges.

“We allege that FedEx has and continues to engage in a pattern of intentionally charging its customers residential delivery fees for deliveries to obviously non-residential addresses such as courthouses, government offices and banks,” a lawyer for the plaintiffs said in an interview.

The lawsuit claims that residential rates were charged customers for deliveries going to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Office, Bank of America Corp., Toyota Motor Credit Corp. and the National Passport Processing Center… and FedEx, which, clearly, is not a residence.

“Perhaps most telling, on at least 70 separate occasions, FedEx improperly charged a residential delivery surcharge to its customers for deliveries to FedEx’s own headquarters,” according to the complaint.

The plaintiffs argue that just the fact that the employee’s emails were sealed are proof that it knew there was overcharging going on. Those emails were just unclassified by court order yesterday.

Everything became clear to the employee in 2008, the sales executive writes in the emails, but that his concerns fell on deaf ears and the problem was swept under the rug by three of his superiors.

“In conversations with each, I used the language, ‘This is a huge class-action lawsuit waiting to happen.’ None of them have ever reported back taking any action to elevate this issue,” he wrote. “FedEx has been systematically overcharging our customers for services that we know we did not provide, and we have been doing so for many years.”

FedEx says these recently unsealed emails aren’t a smoking gun.

“These 11 documents do not tell the entire story of this case,” a FedEx spokeswoman, said. “We will continue to defend these allegations in a court of law and not the media.” She added that customers who think they deserve a refund can go to fedex.com or call 1-800-GoFedEx.

FedEx Overcharged Customers for Years, Sealed E-Mail Says [Bloomberg News]

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