You would probably remember taking a ride long enough to cost tens of thousands of dollars. So one Uber customer was more than a little surprised to find her bank flagging and blocking a $28,639.14 charge from the ride-hailing company. [More]
overcharging
Lawsuit Claims Two McDonald’s Franchises Are Overcharging Customers At O’Hare Airport
By 6.23.16
What you see on the electronic menu may not always be what you get at two McDonald’s franchises located inside Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, according to a new lawsuit that claims the fast food spots are overcharging customers, sometimes by as much as 30%. [More]
Whole Foods CEOs Admit To “Unintentional” Overcharging
By 7.2.15
In 2014, California regulators caught Whole Foods overcharging customers, and things have only gotten worse for the upscale grocery store chain, which is currently under investigation for similar allegations in New York (where it also faces a civil suit from customers). That’s why Whole Foods’ co-CEOs issued a joint, heavily qualified, mea culpa about the situation. [More]
Customer Sues Whole Foods Over Alleged Overcharging In NYC
By 6.26.15
New York City officials accused Whole Foods of overcharging customers in the “the worst case of mislabeling” investigators have seen, a man filed a lawsuit against the upscale food purveyor. He’s seeking damages because he claims he bought several mispriced packages at the stores over the last three years. [More]
NYC Officials Investigating Whole Foods For Allegedly Overcharging On Pre-Packaged Goods
By 6.24.15
After paying $800,000 in California last fall to settle allegations it was overcharging its customers, Whole Foods is once again in hot water for possibly overcharging customers, this time in New York City. [More]
Court Orders Safeway To Refund Overcharges For Online Orders
By 12.15.14
Despite facing two previous lawsuits related to overcharging customers at its bricks-and-mortar stores, it doesn’t appear that Safeway understands the concept that you can’t say something is one price and then make a customer pay more – even online. And last week, a California federal judge ruled Safeway must refund customers the amount of money they were overcharged when the company broke its own terms and conditions by marking up prices of items ordered online. [More]
Hewlett Packard To Pay $32.5M To Settle Allegations Of Overcharging USPS
By 8.1.14
Breaking a promise and overcharging for products is a pretty shady deal to begin with, but when the company you’re taking money from is the already financially-strapped U.S. Postal Service, it’s like rubbing salt in the wound. Hewlett Packard has agreed to pay $32.5 million to settle allegations that it overcharged the USPS for nine years. [More]
Safeway Doesn’t Seem To Care That It Repeatedly Overcharged Customer
By 7.10.13
Safeway is no stranger to overcharging customers. In fact, the supermarket chain has twice been sued by the state of California for failing to have the prices on the shelf match what shows up at the register — and even a court order, it’s continued to screw up. And while Safeway corporate claims to care about accurate prices, that message is not getting through to some stores. [More]
Is 98% Price Accuracy Acceptable For Grocery Stores?
By 12.20.12
Odds are that you’ve been overcharged at some point in your life. Mistakes happen. The big question is: Is there any acceptable level of overcharging? [More]
FedEx Employee Says Company Knew It Was Overcharging Customers, Didn’t Care
By 12.12.12
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. [More]
Report: Safeway Overcharging Even After Court Order
By 11.2.12
Supermarket chain Safeway and its Vons stores have been sued twice in the last decade by the state of California for overcharging customers. Yet, in spite of a court order that penalizes the stores each time it’s caught overcharging, a new report says that customers say it’s still going on. [More]
The Dunkin' Donuts Buttered Bagel Battle
By 4.28.11
Sometimes, the ripoffs that are the most frustrating are the smallest ones: small transactions that are repeated thousands of times and eventually add up to some real money. Brian has one such issue with his local Dunkin’ Donuts outlets: they keep charging him too much for a bagel with butter. Seems petty, doesn’t it? They charge him for a bagel with spread, then charge separately for the butter, at a difference of $1 for every bagel. If he buys a bagel five days a week, fifty weeks a year, that’s $250 over the course of a year. He could be halfway to buying an iPad, just on butter overcharges. [More]
Facebook To Student: That'll Be $300 For Nothing
By 12.8.10
Max says he used Facebook Ads to direct traffic to his computer repair service, and is baffled that the Zuckerberg Death Star is charging him nearly $300 despite receiving only eight weekly page views during the ad campaign — down from his usual 10 weekly hits. A $50 credit helped defray the costs, but he’s still stuck with a $245.17 bill. [More]
Watch Out For Drugstore Price Traps
By 4.7.10
I was at a Rite-Aid a couple of weeks back and went to pick up some cheap dish detergent, and the bottles that I remembered being less than $1.50 were all in the $3-4 range. I left and found sanely-priced soap at another store a few blocks away. Our reader Stan just wrote in with a similar example, where he caught his local CVS charging him three times as much as a nearby competitor. [More]
Investigation Reveals Widespread Fraud In Seafood Packaging
By 3.30.10
It’s a common, legal practice to protect seafood with a layer of ice before packaging it up for retail sale. It’s also apparently a common practice to add that ice into the total weight of the seafood, and in some cases to add more ice than necessary just to bump up the total weight, which isn’t legal and which defrauds the consumer. The National Conference on Weights and Measures recently investigated seafood packaging in 17 states and pulled more than 21,000 packages of seafood from store shelves, noting that in one particularly bad case ice made up 40% of the total listed weight. [More]
Two-Thirds Of Insurers Share Faulty Database That Lets Them Overcharge Patients
By 6.26.09
Earlier this week, a Congressional investigation revealed that several insurance companies rely on a database from Ingenix that deliberately underestimates the cost of medical services, reports the Associated Press. The result is that “American consumers have paid billions of dollars for health care services that their insurance companies should have paid.”
Blockbuster Busted For Overcharging Customers, Must Pay $300k
By 5.19.09
What do you do when the foundation to your business is crumbling and bankrupcty lurks like the Grim Reaper just outside your drop box? If you’re Blockbuster, apparently you charge customers more at the register than what’s displayed on the product, at least in California.
Massachusetts CVS Stores Regularly Overcharge Customers
By 5.7.09
The number of overcharging violations – defined as charging more at the register than the price in an advertisement, on a shelf sign, or on the item itself – soared to 711, from 425.
