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Comment by anoncoward111 | Hacker News Reader

I work customer service for a large heating oil company. The system we have really does just have horrible "bugs" like this that make charges to the account. Not fun when you are on Auto Pay either.

It's malicious. Some of us reps try to help you out and get it all reversed. Others don't give a shit at all.

The main thing you can consider is not paying, blasting them on social media, or just keep calling until you get a nice rep who will fix it, hopefully permanently.

Our system deliberately renews/adjusts prices per gallon and service contracts to pretty much whatever price the company feels like extorting. I've seen customers charged $4000 instead of $2000 countless times. Some even pay it.

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While I’m the last person to trust big business, it’s hard for me to believe that whoever is over the developers who create the billing system would put that in a spec - to deliberately overcharge people.

I’m more inclined to believe incompetence and deprioritizing known bugs to create new features.

How does intentionally writing buggy software even get communicated to the front line developers?

In the case of my company specifically, I'm tempted to say the system is working as intended. A lot of the workflows are deliberately complex and obfuscated, though, so users are trying to enter $2000 but the system will always generate $4000 unless you know exactly which buttons to press.

Who's to blame for this? The CEO and CTO I would say. They want to generate as many inflated bills as possible and then make it really hard for the customer service rep to submit an approval for it to be adjusted.

They train the reps to say, "sorry sir, this is what my computer is telling me your balance is."

The customer then either pays or leaves the company, at which point they are charged an early terminaton fee and threatened with small claims court.

So yeah, I really feel this corporation directly desires a complex and costly process since it has a near monopoly on the market and the cheaper competitors are plagued with product quality issues as opposed to service/billing issues.

It's not that the software is built explicitly to overcharge people. But it is written and launched into production in a buggy state. And the bugs that cost the company money get fixed. The ones that cost the customers are... not prioritized. The overcharging becomes an emergent property.

A friend who is in telecom told me that when talking to a prepaid calling card software company, one of the features was the ability to change by how much the prepaid calling card would overbill.

For instance, you make a 12 minute, 5 second call (12.1 minutes with 6-second billing which means 60 seconds is billed in tenths of a minute) - the software records it as say, 12.6 minutes.

Do they not have call termination logs? I am saying that because service logs have to be accurate by law.

Do you have a source for this? I would love nothing more than for this to be true but I don't think it is. Could this be industry-specific?

Not sure about his industry but all of our calls are recorded in customer service and your verbal acceptance (allegedly) makes you liable for the debt.

I am talking about the sort of prepaid calling cards that you might buy at a gas station or convenience store. I don't know what would happen if you called their customer service line and asked for the logs of your card...

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