Comcast broke law 445,000 times to inflate bills, judge finds
31 replies, posted
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/06/comcast-broke-law-445000-times-in-scheme-to-inflate-bills-judge-finds/
9m is mere pennies to them. I wish it was way more they had to pay back.
Break the law 445 thousand times and all you have to pay is 9million for a company that made roughly 10000x that amount last year in revenue.
Thats less then 1hour of them operating to make up for that.
Laughable.
But remember, corporations won't abuse your rights and break the law if they don't think they'll get caught, this is just a few bad apples.
It's just a fee at this point
Capitalism at work.
b-but it's okay for them because a little rulebreaking to make money is okay because trickledown economy, guys
Back when we had Comcast, they would repeatedly resend bills to us so we could re-pay them, even though my Dad would always pay them on time. Consistently, from month to month, they would always try to make him re-pay bills twice or three times. Eventually we switched to something else because it was costing a fortune to keep their service, only for them to try to squeeze us dry.
Fuck Comcast with a red, hot poker.
In a just world everyone involved in this scheme would get prison time, not just have the company get a measly fine that will have no deterrence on them doing this in the future.
That's actually illegal though. Your father should have gotten a lawyer and taken them to court. Hell if you guys still have the bills and records around, you could do so right now. Nothing speaks louder to corporations than legal settlements.
Businesses breaking the law should have fines tantamount to removing a foot.
not something that is just a prick.
I hate telecom as much as the next guy but I've had comcast for the last ten years and I highly doubt they'd try something THIS brazen.
If it is more profitable to break the law then to follow it, then they will break the law.
I'm surprised it's only 445,000 cases. I remember as a kid my dad having to yell at some cable company rep over the phone when the bills came because they were always trying to rip us off, and I think it was Comcast. He hated doing it, but yelling was the only language they responded to, otherwise they would just keep billing you the fake amount and threatening to cut your service if you didn't pay up.
I'm not sure how this doesn't constitute fraud, and the penalty being so low is a god damn shame. This fine should have put a considerable dent in their profits, large enough to piss off the shareholders. That way the company would have two good reasons to quit scamming their customers every month.
You would be fucken surprised. I mean, you're literally in a thread about how they illegally inflated prices almost half a million times.
Isn’t that only about 20$ per instance of breaking the law?
I wish I could break the law for only 20$.
10mph over the speed limit (and the cop admits I was already slowing down on my own): over 100$.
Scam someone into paying for something useless? 20$ a pop if you’re a big company.
inflating prices is a far cry from completely defrauding your customers with bogus bills. Considering this has never happened to myself, or anyone I know, in my decade with the company and also working for other telecom companies, its more likely that his payments werent processing successfully, or maybe that he was setup on autopay and also paid manually so would have been drafted twice and ended up with a huge positive balance on the account.
either there was just some issue with payments, or the dad didnt want to admit he wasnt paying the bill on time lol.
this thread is literally about charging customers bogus bills
your anecdotal evidence to the contrary doesn't really discount what has happened to others
corporations are people with the same rights as you and I but not the same responsibilities or liabilities as you and I
ya mods dont like me here ive been getting perma'd since 2009
I've had my mouth wide open all my life for the trickle but the only thing I've caught is piss.
No, not really. Even under the Friedman doctrine this isn't right, and that thing is essentially as laissez-faire as it gets under any understanding of capitalism that is even remotely modern.
Comcast and most companies usually keep breaking laws like this, because in certain cases like this the fine ends up being less than the profit they made from doing it in the first place. They do a cost-benefit analysis and determine if it's worth it to change or just keep paying the fine instead.
It's pretty disgusting really.
What if we took a percentage of the company's worth instead of a set amount?
you're not as interesting as you think you are
I say put their executives in actual jail.
Given that jailing people is essentially temporary custody, you probably want them in actual prison instead.
If an average joe did that, even if it was something actually negligeble, they'd charge him trillions and invent a heinous way to punish him
If governments were to actually make decisions about anything, they could adopt day-fines that are based on the offending party’s daily income. Too bad they don’t.
Plenty of cases of poor people getting, for instance, 12 years in jail for shoplifting, or 22 years for stealing a television remote. But if you're rich you can steal hundreds of thousands to millions and get off scott free.
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