Bell cuts phone service to family struggling to pay surprise $1,800 bill

I've often wondered why there aren't laws against predatory pricing.

Things like unknowingly racking up $2,000 in cell phone charges, or $3,000 in overdraft charges of $50 each for 60 different tiny transactions when you had no idea you were over the limit.

I get that it would be hard to craft a law that worked effectively in all cases, but something as simple as for any recurring billing relationship with a consumer, any time a period's accrued billing reaches double their previous period, the consumer cannot be on the hook for additional charges unless the account holder (not user) authorizes them up to a new amount? (And for the first period, whenever it goes over, say, an average national user's spending.)

It would be up to the utility to suspend service temporarily in the meantime or not... but you could never be stuck with a surprise horrible bill because you didn't understand your iPhone was sucking up data in another country without you realizing.

I've actually used a monthly automatic pre-paid SIM card on my iPhone for years (in NYC), because it's cheaper and I know it's impossible to accrue surprise charges.

Assuming ≤10,000 text messages, that's around $1,350 per MB.

Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the actions of the family in question, that seems somewhat perverse.

Charging for texts is such a scam, but this is exactly why when I was a teenager I was on a pre-paid plan. My parents knew I wasn't responsible enough yet to understand how charges work, and that the phone company wouldn't care.

Bell does this because they know they can get away with it. With barely any competition - and the other 2 companies act the exact same way - they know that people will be pissed but nobody will change carriers.

There was a large bit of media last year about cost caps and limitations. But, hey, that only covers part of your bill since Texting is a different "service". This is how Bell gets away with it. They may finally back off now that this has hit the national/international news but it shouldn't need to reach that point.

How is the teenager supposed to know her text is going to the US or is being sent from the US? Maybe she knows where her friends are and maybe she doesn't. In any case this can happen to absolutely anybody at any time. I don't know where my friends may be located at every moment of the day (I guess they take vacations sometimes). And with the constant barrage of spam I doubt I would even believe a random message telling me to pay up.

What causes a company to charge these obscene rates? Is it some loophole in “transit” costs? I am thinking something similar to the “inbound revenue” received by “free phone conference” services - these “last mile” providers have special agreements higher costs, etc..

I had something like this happen with my data plan during a power outage, and Verizon called me, switched me over to a flat rate plan that covered the charge, and backdated it to eliminate the ridiculous fees.

Bell have every right to stick to their guns, but it seems like a really dumb decision.

Is $1800 really worth the negative press and focussing legislators on a part of the business that was not included in prior legislations?

This seems like something that Bell's Loyalty and Retention could have taken care of. I know with Telus they'll often prorate for overages --- though, I've never had anything close to this level.

So while this is on the parents, it seems silly to potentially lose a long-term client that will be paying well over that over the course of their contracts.

I have been living in the US for one and a half year now, I'm still using my French phone contract in roaming because it's cheaper than using a local one (20€/mo, data limited to 25GB in roaming).

So very tired of this victim narrative. Simply refuse to pay the bill and sign up for another cell service.

Honestly it's hard for me to feel very sympathetic to either side here.

If the unlimited CA->USA texting is $12, the phone company should ask them to sign up for it, and charge them $100 penalty and be done with it.

But on the other hand why aren't the parents keeping an eye on what their daughter's doing with her phone?

Is this the same Bell that got split in the US for anti-trust reasons?

Thankfully iMessage and soon RCS will be replacing these wasteful services.

Bell could have done a better job notifying them of the overages and helping them with a plan to pay but besides that I don't see the problem. They agreed to the plan terms when they signed the contract. They need to pay their bills.

I don't believe people's unwillingness or inability to read and understand the contracts they sign constitutes predatory business practices. Unless they were misled when signing the contract, I don't see why this is a problem. Not only are there other phone services you can use if you didn't like this pricing structure, you can also just use a non-sms based messenger, like signal or whatsapp.

The company made multiple attempts to inform them of the problem, and they ignored it all. But they have a lot of excuses for ignoring each and every one of them. Business plan and the teen is on it. Not a good idea. Don't know the texting charges? Don't know the teen is sending thousands of texts or to who? Parents were totally negligent and should pay the full bill, and get the teen to reimburse them. Sounds like the parents realized they messed up since they were trying hard to pay this bill. But knowing there was a huge current problem and it involved the line they depend on for their business, they should have been on top of it. By the time they said they weren't checking their spam folder they already knew that they weren't getting updates on the texts about overages from their teen. When you're in trouble on something like this you need to be on top of it and not just ignore emails and texts. If you have your spam filter set up so it's deleting critical emails necessary for the existence of your business, that's your own fault as well.

All this said their texting charges must be absolutely exorbitant and this company is certainly ripping people off. But I bet their fees are disclosed in the contract, and for a business service that contract should have been read.

Undoubtedly they have internet service also and most of the texts could have been sent for free. There's dozens of services that will send texts for free. Hopefully the teen will learn to use them, or get her friends to use Facetime etc. Expensive lesson but getting off of fee based SMS text asap is going to save them money in the long run.