T-Mobile John LeGere FTC
Last week we reported, along with a hundred other sites, that the FTC was suing T-Mobile for cramming. Cramming is when third party billing companies bill customers for text messaging services that they don’t believe, or don’t remember signing up for. In most instances the customer didn’t read the fine print, in others, they really just don’t think they signed up for the services which can include horoscopes, sports scores and even dating advice.
The FTC alleges that T-Mobile made “hundreds of millions” of dollars off unsuspecting customers, even after they committed to stopping this practice alongside Verizon and Sprint last year.
New T-Mobile CEO is adamant that the company did no such thing. Since taking office at the nation’s fourth largest carrier CEO John Legere has been preaching that he is all about the customer. That’s why all of T-Mobile’s marketing efforts have been placed on the “un-carrier” movement, removing contracts, early termination fees and even giving customers free music services. Legere continues to stand up for his position in a blog post penned to the FTC saying “T-Mobile and I stand for one thing: doing right by consumers!”
Legere adamantly denies any wrong doing. In the first part of the blog post he makes one thing clear “T-Mobile is NOT participating in any form of cramming, stuffing charges for un-purchased services, or trying to be anything less than totally transparent with each of our customers. PERIOD!”
He goes on to admit that between 2009 and 2013 all four carriers, including T-Mobile participating in this third party billing for content providers. ” As we all know now, there were some fraudsters in that bunch. That is why, as we found them, we terminated them..” He says that T-Mobile, alongside the other three carriers, terminated all of those services in November 2014 when the stop was announced nationwide.
With all of this in mind Legere wanted to make sure that all T-Mobile customers know that if they feel they’ve been duped by these third party content providers that there is a solution. On June 10th they announced a Proactive Refund Program. They are combing their customer billing base to insure these types of charges are not on customer bills and if they are they are either eliminating the charges and refunding customers. A T-Mobile spokesperson told Techfaster that if there is any question about these types of charges on a customer bill they can call T-Mobile customer service and have that charged removed.
So there ya have it.
