Last November, I started up one of my patented Pogue Fights for the Consumer campaigns on my blog. I noted that Verizon Wireless was charging $2 a pop every time customers accidentally pressed the up-arrow key on their flip phones — the keystroke that comes hard-wired to mean “take me to the Web.”
Shortly thereafter, a whistle-blower who works at Verizon confirmed this:
“If you open the flip and accidentally press the up arrow key, you see that the phone starts to connect to the web. So you hit END right away. Well, too late. You will be charged $1.99 for that 0.02 kilobytes of data. Legal, yes; ethical, NO.
“Every month, the 87 million customers will accidentally hit that key a few times a month! That’s over $300 million per month in data revenue off a simple mistake!
“Our marketing, billing, and technical departments are all aware of this. But they have failed to do anything about it — and why? Because if you get 87 million customers to pay $1.99, why stop this revenue?”
To my delight, the Federal Communications Commission began an investigation last winter. It asked Verizon to explain itself.
Verizon responded with a letter that, in essence, denied everything. It claimed that it had installed a “landing page” that gives you the opportunity to cancel your mistake before you get billed.
“Usage fees are not charged when a customer simply launches the Internet browser and lands on the Verizon Wireless Mobile Web homepage, which is the default setting,” the company said. Instead, Verizon said, you have to “navigate away” from that landing page.
The company was pretty much saying, “It’s not our fault if our dim-bulb customers are getting nailed with these $2 fees.”
Yet the $2 fees continued to appear. Readers continued to forward me their bills showing them. And I continued to blast Verizon for its deception.
Well, I’m thrilled to report that Verizon finally came clean. As Times reporter Edward Wyatt reported Monday, the company now acknowledges the $2 accidental-key-press problem — the same one it denied last December:
“Approximately 15 million customers who did not have data plans were billed for data sessions on their phones that they did not initiate,” the company said on Sunday. “These customers would normally have been billed at the standard rate of $1.99 per megabyte for any data they chose to access from their phones.”
There are two reasons to celebrate here.
First, Verizon’s “I’m sorry” will take the form of $90 million in customer refunds. Merry Christmas!
Second, the F.C.C. — yes, your much-maligned government — did exactly what you’d hope it would do. It took on a company that was doing wrong — even though it’s an enormous heavy-hitter with deep-pocketed lobbyists — and made them do the right thing.
Thank you, readers, for alerting me to this in the first place. On this day, the system worked, and a little good was done in the world.