Receive a $400 phone bill for texting. That's ridiculous, but it happened

I wasn't too surprised when I read the news this morning. All the telecom carrier/company want to charge more to their customers as much as possible. They won't really tell you what to be careful. When you find the unusual charge, they will happy to show you in the agreement with very small line.  Good thing is if you talk to them, you probably get the chance to waive the money. If you don't say anything, they will happy to collect from you.  
Be careful on what you do on your phone. There're many hidden cost from the telecom company. 

Dad takes stand against Rogers over texting charges

A B.C. father is refusing to pay a $1,400 bill received from Rogers after his teenaged son was charged for sending hundreds of texts to his girlfriend, despite a contract that includes unlimited texting in Canada.

"I thought he could text a thousand times a day, because that’s perfectly fine. He’s covered for all of Canada," said Alex Dunsmore of Kamloops, B.C. "His girlfriend lives four blocks away."

It started when Dunsmore's son's girlfriend downloaded a "free" texting app — from a U.S. company called HeyWire — to send free texts anywhere. When Dunsmore’s son Ryan texted her back, he had no idea it would incur a charge for long distance texts, routed through the U.S. then to his girlfriend in Canada.

“He was responding to a text.… He thought he was just texting down the street,” Dunsmore said. “Obviously it took a long, different path [via] Arlington, Illinois."

Over 1,000 texts sent

Dunsmore said Rogers allowed 1,300 of those texts to go through in one month — all to the same number — without informing him his son's $35 "unlimited" texting plan was going way over the basic charge.

 “Why was I not notified, as the legally responsible person in this contract, that there was suddenly this atypical spending?” Dunsmore asked.

He said this type of long distance texting should trigger a notice to the customer, similar to the one sent when cellphone customers leave Canada and face roaming charges.

“I think that somebody somewhere has decided not to [notify customers] about this because they don’t have to.”

When Dunsmore got the bill — $400 for one month, including the texts — he complained to Rogers and refused to pay for that portion.

Ryan Dunsmore was replying to texts sent by his girlfriend, who was using a U.S.-based app. (CBC)

“I think it’s a deliberate process on Rogers's part to try to get more money out of their clients,” he said.

Dunsmore continued to pay for the services he signed up for. He appealed to Rogers to forgive the texting charges, he said, but got nowhere. He said the company told him his son should have recognized the U.S. area code on the number his girlfriend was given by the app provider.

Dunsmore pointed out that his 16-year-old doesn’t know all the area codes inside or outside Canada, and that Ryan's girlfriend told him it was a special number for free texting.

“She feels pretty bad. Not that it’s her fault or anything,” Ryan Dunsmore said.

'No charge' to app user

Ryan’s girlfriend had downloaded the app on her iPod through the iTunes App Store. HeyWire’s advertising on its App Store page says there is "no charge to you even if your friends don’t have the app."

"Both parties are thinking it’s free," Alex Dunsmore said. "There is no notification on her end, either. As far as she’s concerned, she’s texting for free."

Because the texting charges went into arrears, Rogers eventually cut off both Dunsmore's son's and daughter's phones — and charged him $800 for "cancelling" the contracts. (Dunsmore doesn't have his own cellphone).

"They charged me $400 [each] because the contract was terminated early. But they were the ones that terminated it because I simply didn’t pay the money in dispute," he said.

Rogers told CBC News in an email that it’s up to parents to monitor their teen’s usage.

"I recognize that the customer may find this frustrating," spokesperson Leigh-Ann Popek wrote. "But the account holder is ultimately responsible for the account. We do not monitor how many texts or calls customers make. But we offer the tools to allow our customers to keep a close eye on their usage.

"Customers are able to see their current usage through our free Rogers MyAccount app on their device or online at www.rogers.com. This is especially helpful for parents."

'A lot of money in it'

Vancouver app developer and industry commentator Ian Bell said he believes it’s in Rogers's financial interest not to inform parents when these kinds of charges are mounting.

"Carriers need to do a better job of helping people understand when they are incurring these charges as they are happening. But they are not, because there’s a lot of money in it."

Rogers said it's up to parents to monitor their teens' usage carefully. (CBC)

Rogers said it has no business relationship with HeyWire and does not share in any revenue generated from people downloading the app. "Rogers would not be compensated by HeyWire, nor would we compensate HeyWire for any downloads, users, usage of their application," Popek said.

However, telecom companies do get a cut of the long-distance texting charges billed to their customers.

"Part of the long distance charge goes to Rogers, part goes to the U.S. carrier," said Marc Choma of the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association. He said Canadian telecoms don't reveal how much their cut is, even to him.

Choma also said the popularity of texting has exploded, especially among teens. Last year, he said, 78 billion texts were sent from within Canada, compared to 56.4 billion in 2010. He said he doesn't know how many of those texts were sent via apps.

Companies 'always looking for another sucker'

Commentator Bell said telecoms and app marketers count on customers blaming themselves for excessive charges and simply paying the bills.

"People get caught in it, then they stop using the app forever and then they move on," Bell said. "These [app] companies are always looking for another sucker."

Dunsmore’s bill from Rogers — for the texts, contract cancellations and other fees — is now almost $1,400. It’s been sent to a collection agency, but he said he won’t pay it out of principle.

"Cellphone companies are getting a reputation, and I believe rightly so, of actually bullying people around," he said. "This is about what is reasonable and what is right."

Source: CBC news

Quite interesting news. After getting my credit card, I seldom use cash. However, imagine there's cashless economy in your country. I don't know how if I can accept that, but Sweden is heading there.

Sweden moving towards cashless economy

Vicar Johan Tyrberg in the Carl Gustaf Church in Karlshamn, southern Sweden, on Sept 7, 2011, stands next to a credit card machine enabling worshippers to donate money to the church collection without carrying money in their pockets. (AP Photo/Camilla Lindskog)

(AP) STOCKHOLM - Sweden was the first European country to introduce bank notes in 1661. Now it's come farther than most on the path toward getting rid of them.

"I can't see why we should be printing bank notes at all anymore," says Bjoern Ulvaeus, former member of 1970's pop group ABBA, and a vocal proponent for a world without cash.

The contours of such a society are starting to take shape in this high-tech nation, frustrating those who prefer coins and bills over digital money.

In most Swedish cities, public buses don't accept cash; tickets are prepaid or purchased with a cell phone text message. A small but growing number of businesses only take cards, and some bank offices — which make money on electronic transactions — have stopped handling cash altogether.

"There are towns where it isn't at all possible anymore to enter a bank and use cash," complains Curt Persson, chairman of Sweden's National Pensioners' Organization.

He says that's a problem for elderly people in rural areas who don't have credit cards or don't know how to use them to withdraw cash.

The decline of cash is noticeable even in houses of worship, like the Carl Gustaf Church in Karlshamn, southern Sweden, where Vicar Johan Tyrberg recently installed a card reader to make it easier for worshippers to make offerings.

"People came up to me several times and said they didn't have cash but would still like to donate money," Tyrberg says.

Bills and coins represent only 3 percent of Sweden's economy, compared to an average of 9 percent in the eurozone and 7 percent in the U.S., according to the Bank for International Settlements, an umbrella organization for the world's central banks.

Three percent is still too much if you ask Ulvaeus. A cashless society may seem like an odd cause for someone who made a fortune on "Money, Money, Money" and other ABBA hits, but for Ulvaeus it's a matter of security.

After his son was robbed for the third time he started advocating a faster transition to a fully digital economy, if only to make life harder for thieves.

"If there were no cash, what would they do?" says Ulvaeus, 66.

The Swedish Bankers' Association says the shrinkage of the cash economy is already making an impact in crime statistics.

The number of bank robberies in Sweden plunged from 110 in 2008 to 16 in 2011 — the lowest level since it started keeping records 30 years ago. It says robberies of security transports are also down.

"Less cash in circulation makes things safer, both for the staff that handle cash, but also of course for the public," says Par Karlsson, a security expert at the organization.

The prevalence of electronic transactions — and the digital trail they generate — also helps explain why Sweden has less of a problem with graft than countries with a stronger cash culture, such as Italy or Greece, says economics professor Friedrich Schneider of the Johannes Kepler University in Austria.

"If people use more cards, they are less involved in shadow economy activities," says Schneider, an expert on underground economies.

In Italy — where cash has been a common means of avoiding value-added tax and hiding profits from the taxman — Prime Minister Mario Monti in December put forward measures to limit cash transactions to payments under euro1,000 ($1,300), down from euro2,500 before.

The flip side is the risk of cybercrimes. According to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention the number of computerized fraud cases, including skimming, surged to nearly 20,000 in 2011 from 3,304 in 2000.

Oscar Swartz, the founder of Sweden's first Internet provider, Banhof, says a digital economy also raises privacy issues because of the electronic trail of transactions. He supports the idea of phasing out cash, but says other anonymous payment methods need to be introduced instead.

"One should be able to send money and donate money to different organizations without being traced every time," he says.

It's no surprise that Sweden and other Nordic countries are at the forefront of this development, given their emphasis on technology and innovation.

For the second year in a row, Sweden ranked first in the Global Information Technology Report released at the World Economic Forum in January. The Economist Intelligence Unit also put Sweden top of its latest digital economy rankings, in 2010. Both rankings measure how far countries have come in integrating information and communication technologies in their economies.

Internet startups in Sweden and elsewhere are now hard at work developing payment and banking services for smartphones.

Swedish company iZettel has developed a device for small traders, similar to Square in the U.S., that plugs into the back of an iPhone to make it work like a credit card terminal. Sweden's biggest banks are expected to launch a joint service later this year that allows customers to transfer money between each other's accounts in real-time with their cell phones.

Most experts don't expect cash to disappear anytime soon, but that its proportion of the economy will continue to decline as such payment options become available. Before retiring as deputy governor of Sweden's central bank, Lars Nyberg said last year that cash will survive "like the crocodile, even though it may be forced to see its habitat gradually cut back."

Andrea Wramfelt, whose bowling alley in the southern city of Landskrona stopped accepting cash in 2010, makes a bolder prediction: She believes coins and notes will cease to exist in Sweden within 20 years.

"Personally I think this is what people should expect in the future," she says.

But there are pockets of resistance. Hanna Celik, whose family owns a newspaper kiosk in a Stockholm shopping mall, says the digital economy is all about banks seeking bigger earnings.

Celik says he gets charged about 5 Swedish kronor ($0.80) for every credit card transaction, and a law passed by the Swedish Parliament prevents him from passing on that charge to consumers.

"That stinks," he says. "For them (the banks), this is a very good way to earn a lot of money, that's what it's all about. They make huge profits."

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