Wireless giant Sprint enabled hidden-fee abuse of its customers for nearly a decade, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau alleged on Wednesday. Sprint allowed third-party firms to “cram” unwanted services onto consumer bills, and kept about one-third of the proceeds for itself, the CFPB said. In other words, Sprint was complicit [Keep reading]
If you want to know why Gotcha Capitalism persists, so stubbornly in America — corporations surviving mostly on their ability to trick consumers — I can explain it to you in four words. No material financial impact. Recently, 45 states attorneys general thought enough about complaints about satellite radio firm [Keep reading]
You might think it’s weird that Comcast is planning to turn your home into a public WiFi hotspot, but two plaintiffs in California think it’s illegal. A lawsuit filed in a California federal court seeks class-action status, claiming Comcast is costing consumers electricity and bandwidth, and creating security risks, with [Keep reading]
When a company like Comcast sends you mail promising that it is going to give you something for free, I hope your first reaction is the same as mine. “Uh-oh. What will this cost?” And when a customer service rep *promises* you that something will or won’t happen, I hope [Keep reading]
When you have a dispute over a bill with a company, sometimes it’s not enough to respond to a collections notice with evidence that the bill has been paid. Sadly, even if the collections firm appears to drop the matter it can still come up again, and again, and again. [Keep reading]
Last year, I reported on Sirius XM’s gotcha-laden business practices for tricking consumers into paying for their service (thanks for publishing it, Credit.com). In my case, the firm simply refused to allow me to sign up without agreeing to automatic renewal, which I hate. I had experienced surprise renewals from [Keep reading]
A low credit score can’t give you a heart attack, but it might mean you’ll have one soon, a new study has found. There’s now another reason to keep track of your credit, and it actually can be a matter of life or death. Researchers at Duke University have found a [Keep reading]
Facebook took a step today towards addressing perhaps the most common gripe its users have — control of the “news feed” that users see when they log in. Users choose which friends and pages are eligible to be in the news feed, but Facebook’s algorithm decides what actually appears there. [Keep reading]
Tis the season of haunting zombies, and being scared by something you thought was dead. That can be a pretty good description of how the debt collection business works sometimes. You might think an old checking account is long dead, but there are ghoulish ways those accounts can come back [Keep reading]
Some less-than-above-board debt collectors deploy a number of unsavory tactics while trying to persuade consumers to give them money, but none worse than this: trying to collect on debts that just don’t exist. It happens, often. Sometimes, bad records are to blame. Debt notes are often sold, re-sold and re-sold [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan