Complaint Review: Nationwide Conn. OAN Services - Northridge California

It probably won't come as a total surprise when I tell you that the phone company is not really your friend, but you might be startled to find them complicit in committing fraud. Here's the story.

We have a shop phone number that we keep active only for emergencies--actually it hasn't even had an instrument attached for half a year. What the hell, it only costs $15.00 a month. So we were a little surprised to find an $8.41 charge added on to our last bill--from "OAN Services, Inc., Billed on Behalf of Nationwide Conn. Inc."

There's something funny about the way that "Nationwide" is spelled out in full in our statement while whatever the second word is, is abbreviated. Naturally we called SBC to find out what was going on, if maybe they were giving us a hint. Apparently part of the deregulation picture is the ability for companies to require SBC to add charges to your bill for whatever services they may allege they've provided to you. In this case we were charged for a 10 minute long distance call to Provo, Utah.

Yeah, it could have been a mistake. There's a lotta people making calls in this here western states region. There could have been some kind of bug in the telco switch that just inverted the sense of a byte, maybe a storm surge of current that busted a silicon levee. It could even have been some individual phone phreak whistling into the receiver who figured out the melody that pushes their charges off to someone else. We used to think of those guys as heroes. But you know what? I don't think so.

Nah, this has the classic earmarks of a penny charges scam. It's a single charge that won't recur--it's under ten bucks so people won't generally get to excited about it. Above all, it's manageable--excuse me if I'm slandering them, but you set up your customer service group, four or five high school grads from a midwest state will do, you establish a plausibly long on-hold queue to encourage compainers to give up, and you create a subsidiary billing firm to whom you can pass the buck and ensure deniability of ownership of any individual issue. I tell you, if this isn't a criminal enterprise it should be.

What's missing here? Somewhere there's an dialing engine that is identifying numbers that can be erroneously charged. You've seen the signs of these--the phone rings, you leap from the toilet to answer it, and...no one's there. "Hello? Hello?" It's hard to know for sure, probably there's a clever aggregation algorithm that routes the no-answer calls to the false charge department while the calls that are screened by answering machines go into another bucket, and your call, tagged by a voice recognizer that knows what ambient sound is, is passed as a prime prospect to telemarketers, maybe even for sale to the Democratic Party or the United Farm Workers, my personal perennial favorites.

So, I joke, I'm making fun, but really I'm serious. I could buy a couple of cafe lattes for $8.41. And more that a little angry about it. Who do I blame for this? The corporate criminals at Nationwide Con, first. This is not a victimless white-collar crime. I am the victim. I am going to dispute the charge, pay the bill, and I want that CEO in jail. Second, the congresspeople who voted this telecommunications "reform" into law. When they paid their lip service to market competition they knew full well they were just sponsoring fly-by-night freebootery.

I'm going to back away a little bit from my claim that SBC is complicit in this illegality, their hands may actually be tied in the matter, but they surely must be aware that it is going on--I'll simply say it's reprehensible. Finally, the FCC--how is that investigation going, guys? You don't have to speculate like me--there are a lot of ways to prove this case.

Good night, and good luck.

Steve

Emeryville, California
U.S.A.