Verizon Wireless to make $25M payment for billing error

Verizon Wireless (VZ) said it has agreed to a “voluntary payment” of $25 million to the U.S. Treasury to settle an investigation into inaccurate billing of about 15 million customers. The payment is the results of an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission initiated in response to complaints that the nation’s largest wireless operator had wrongly charged customers for data services.
The company said earlier this month that it would refund impacted customers between $2 and $6, with some receiving larger amounts, after customers without data plans were billed for data sessions that they did not initiate. Most of those sessions involved data transmissions caused by software on their devices, while others were web access that should not have incurred a data charge. The carrier typically charges customers $2 per megabyte for data transmission when they are not on a data plan.
Current customers eligible for the refund will be notified in upcoming bills, while former customers will receive a letter and refund check in the mail.
In total, Verizon Wireless said it would $52.8 million to reimburse customers. The carrier last week reported $16.25 billion in third quarter revenues with about one-fourth coming from data services.
“Verizon Wireless works very hard to simplify the wireless experience for customers and to ensure that customer bills are accurate,” the company noted in a statement. “Nonetheless, internal billing processes can be complex and, in this case, we made inadvertent billing mistakes. We accept responsibility for those errors, and apologize to our customers who received accidental data charges on their bills.”
Verizon Wireless added that it will provide “targeted information about data usage and tracking to new and existing customers, in both English and Spanish; establish a special internal team to track, identify and address customer data usage complaints; and provide additional training on data charge and credit issues to all of our customer-facing customer care employees.”