14 DAY TRIAL // In the era of Wi-Fi and super-fast LTE connectivity, some people living in the United States still use an old-school, low-speed dial-up subscription to access the Internet.
In fact, there are about 2.2 million households spread across the US that still take advantage of the AOL dial-up. Interesting, isn’t it?
This is also the case of an 83-year-old Los Angeles man, named Ron Dorff, who goes online using AOL services. This went smoothly for a while, until his phone company, AT&T, inadvertently played a nasty trick on the senior citizen.
Out of the blue, the carrier sent him a $24,298 / €22,032 bill for using the landline to access AOL services. Naturally, Dorff was shocked and contacted AT&T saying there was no way he could afford to make such a payment. But the company’s representatives insisted he had to.
AT&T didn't even notice the abnormal bill
That’s when he reached out for help to the Los Angeles Times. When the publication got involved in the story, AT&T seemed to change its position and appeared all too willing to investigate what was going on, when previously it didn't seem to want to do so.
As it turns out, Dorff's modem was misconfigured to dial a long distance number, racking up massive charges while the man spent time online, which explains the huge bill he received.
What’s particularly odd is that AT&T didn't spot the anomaly before it got out of hand. Wouldn't a huge bill like that for a dial-up modem seem odd?
The carrier defends itself saying that such situations are very rare and they are addressed on an individual basis.
However, the company failed to elaborate on whether its billing system is capable of detecting unusual charges such as this. But as the story above proves, the system is pretty faulty. So the question is, why doesn’t AT&T set up a system for this kind of situations?
A company representative stated that the carrier never refused to look into the atypical situation and they were actually working with the customer to reach a beneficial resolution for both sides.
It might be that Dorff just misheard what AT&T was trying to communicate to him, or maybe the operator was so clueless that it could have allowed an 83-year-old man to pay a $24,000 / €22,032 bill for dial-up service.