Loading ...David Bach over at Yahoo wrote a very interesting piece covering stolen cell phone charges and how the owners are getting stuck with the enormous fees.
In one case a Cingular customer had her phone stolen when we went over seas and had a $26,000 bill racked up; Cingular’s response? Pay up, or file bankruptcy.
It seems that your liability can be limited if you are able to report the phone missing immediately. Even in those cases though, most contracts will state that you are responsible for all charges incurred until the phone is reported missing. In the article David mentions a woman that reported her cell phone missing immediately but was still being held responsible for the $1800 charge racked up between the time it was taken and her reporting it.
David breaks down a great list of tips on how to protect yourself, but the gist of it is this:
- Report the phone immediately
- Any time you talk to anyone about the issue, especially the customer support reps, record everything about the talk (name, ID, phone #, extension, time spoken too, etc.) and ask for a printed or email confirmation from them that your phone has been discontinued.
- File a police report. Apparently some carriers will use this to slow you down trying to get out of paying someone else’s charges.
- Get ready to fight. The carriers push so much lobbying money down policy maker’s throats that they can get away with whatever rules they want to make.
Update #1: slapshot24 over in the Digg comments of this post mentioned that apparently Cingular dropped the charges against Wendy and implemented a new program to avoid things like this in the future. Wendy, saved by the bell.
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April 25th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
“David mentions a woman that reported her cell phone missing immediately but was still being held responsible for the $1800 charge racked up between the time it was taken and her reporting it.”
Doesn’t sound like she immediately reported it.
She may have reported it as soon as she realized it was stolen, but she did not report it the second it was stolen. 
(Otherwise that was one expensive 1 minute phone call for $1800) 
October 26th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
My phone was stolen and I did not realize it. I very seldom use my phone so for not even noticing it was gone could happen very easily. I reported the minute I noticed such, about 3 days and now are being charged by TMOBILE because I did not know it was stolen or even missing. A police report was filed and the police did not care one bit because my phone was not expensive. Does anyone know how to get around this? I have 5 lines with TMobile and to cancel the few months left on the contracts they will charge me excessive fees. There has to be some way to get around this when you are truly an innocent victim that does not use a cell phone much! Please let me know if anyone comes up with anything. Thank you
October 28th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
Meg,
If you can get the records for the phone calls made *after* you lost the cell, and prove that they weren’t you (for example, they were all to numbers you had never called before and were all from a state far away that you’ve never been or something like that) and were sufficiently polite to the T-Mobile customer support rep, they might consider waving the fees.
However if the calls are to people that you normally call or still made from inside your home town, T-Mobile has no reason to think that *wasn’t* you and likely won’t drop the charges.
As far as canceling the lines to get out of the bills, you are right that could be hugely expensive so you might want to try and rectify the situation with T-Mobile over the minutes first and see if that helps.