[106504] in North American Network Operators' Group
Level3 tries cell-phone style billing scam on customers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Patrick Giagnocavo)
Thu Jul 31 11:47:02 2008
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:46:42 -0400
From: Patrick Giagnocavo <patrick@zill.net>
To: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
Today I looked at my most recent bill from Level3.
They are now assessing a 2.5% surcharge, which is listed as "Taxes" on
the bandwidth bill I have. In the state of PA, telecoms services are
explicitly not taxable.
When you call Level3 billing, they admit in their recorded message it is
not a tax at all, but a surcharge, and if you want to dispute it you are
supposed to quote back their own contract terms to them via email (i.e.
you cannot reach a human).
I would expect this kind of scamminess from Verizon's cell-phone
billing, but a contract is a contract and I can see no provision for
arbitrarily tacking on fees, illegally labeling them as "taxes" and then
putting the onus on you to prove that they can't charge you.
Anyone else seeing this same behavior from Level3?
(It seems that the larger a telecom company gets, the more they want to
act like a scum-sucking ILEC.)
--Patrick
