I’ll confess that this entry is a bit of a mixed bag in that the usual scramble to scrape together enough funds to pay the mortgage-sized telephone bill is going to be at least less stressful and harrowing and that’s a good thing but I’m genuinely mystified why I couldn’t have had that same consideration all along.
A month ago, I shared how unimpressed I was with AT&T’s latest in a series of unmitigated cash grabs when they helped themselves to even more money out of my pocket with the absolute bare minimum of notice forcing me to change plans in order to mitigate the damage they were doing to my fragile finances.
What I didn’t mention at the time was that they’d already eliminated the token discount for automatically paying with a credit card about a year earlier in order to continue matching the race to the bottom by the big wireless carriers.
Want that discount back?
You’ve got to let them have access to your bank account!
As you can imagine, that’s a scary proposition at best with a company that has AT&T’s history of data breaches exposing sensitive information including financial details.
There were two class-action lawsuits that were consolidated involving data breaches that had some particularly scary information leaked (particularly AT&T 1 Settlement Class):
Who is a Settlement Class Member? There are two Settlement Classes:
https://www.telecomdatasettlement.com/
- AT&T 1 Settlement Class: All living persons in the United States whose Data Elements (which include some combination of names, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, account passcodes, billing account numbers, and Social Security numbers) were included in the AT&T 1 Data Incident, announced on March 30, 2024; AND
- AT&T 2 Settlement Class: AT&T Account Owners or Line or End Users whose AT&T 2 Data Elements were involved in the AT&T 2 Data Incident. AT&T 2 Data Elements means telephone numbers of current and former AT&T customers, including, but not limited to, Account Owners or Line Users, which may have been accessible in the AT&T 2 Data Incident, along with the telephone numbers with which those customers interacted, counts of those interactions, aggregate call durations for a day or month, and for a small subset of individuals, one or more cell site identification numbers associated with the interactions.
I happened to be qualified as a member of both classes which doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.
The other thing that doesn’t fill me with a whole lot of confidence in AT&T’s competence in being a responsible steward of my private details is that I know there have been many more breaches of AT&T systems than they’ve admitted to publicly (often after being sued rather than proactively before the complaint is filed in court!) and who knows what the nasty hackers have made off with in their smash-and-grab.
But in order to make the numbers work to keep an astronomical bill from transitioning to an even bigger orbit, I had to give in and actually fork over the ACH details to restore the discount I’d once had with a much safer form of payment than potentially letting a bad actor (whether it’s AT&T or one of their many hackers) have access to drain the account.
I have no doubts that were that to occur, I’d be made good but financial institutions aren’t all that hot at fixing the problem in a timely fashion especially when it’s the fault of a massive corporation whose first instinct is to deny they ever caused a problem in the first place.
I guess the only saving grace is that there’s rarely enough money in the account that any thief wanting to drain it electronically is likely to be quite disappointed in my contributions to their ill-gotten boodle.
Fast forward to today when my bill finally was made available to me the customary 5-6 days after it was actually cycled and I was genuinely wondering how quickly I was expected to magically stump up the cash which up to now had been an incredibly generous 48 hours.
So imagine my surprise when the day of reckoning turned out to be 12 Jun rather than the expected 30 May?
In fairness, it was a pleasant surprise but I had to jump on to the chat with the Filipino agent halfway round the world to make sure that they’d not buggered the bill cycle as well as make sure that date was actually legitimate.
It turns out that the cycle remains the same on the 23rd of the month and I can still expect them to sit on it for another roughly six days before they bother telling me what the number is which still sucks.
But having two weeks to figure it out rather than two days was definitely a pleasant surprise so naturally I had to ask the agent why in the heck they couldn’t have been that accommodating all along rather than making paying off the bill the stressful exercise it has been!
It turns out that the only way you get the normal amount of time to digest a complex and crammed telephone bill before being expected to pay is via ACH direct debit of the account.
Credit and debit cards (even if that debit card is targeting the same bank account and would at least be a somewhat safer choice than direct ACH access given their history!)…nope, no discount for you and very little time to pay up.
That seems more than a little stupid to me.
I can understand they might not be all that trusting of credit/debit cards because it’s not unheard of for them to get hand in face when making the debit through the billing system due to insufficient available funds.
But frankly if that’s possible with a credit/debit card, it’s even more likely with an actual bank account!
And the policy is even more absurd when you consider that there’s about as many payment failures due to the payment gateways and card processors than there are insufficient funds.
Google Fibre was in the middle of replacing their billing system with something supposedly better (never mind the fact that the old system worked perfectly fine for what I needed to do and never missed a payment) when their bill came due and the idiotic bank Intuit uses declined the charge.
Not because there wasn’t funds but because they’re imbeciles running the bank with baling wire and tin cans with strings between them for voice communications. Resubmitting the payment to that same imbecile bank with the same details a few hours later went through perfectly fine (though that new billing system decided to send me another EMAIL saying that the account was past due a day after I’d already paid and confirmed the payment…so once again I’m an unpaid beta-tester!).
If AT&T actually cared about their consumers, they’d be encouraging more safe methods of payment via real credit cards where disputes are usually pro forma and the system is designed to handle charge-backs and fraud with the existing slush fund from their exorbitant processing fees and finance charges.
And it doesn’t tend to drain your bank account in the process which is why I preferred using the credit card (and in the interest of full disclosure…getting some small cash back perks!) as opposed to a debit card which can also drain your bank account.
If a hacker gets the credit card number and starts running up bills, that can be stopped fairly easily and the fraudulent charges dismissed. It’s a hassle and then you have to change all of the billing pointing to that card but it’s a lot less of a headache than trying to fight like hell to get your money back at a bank where your account’s been drained through no fault of your own.
I suspect the real reason for the policy was to abuse people who preferred credit cards because they’re big enough to get away with it.
There was nothing stopping them from voluntarily allowing two weeks to pay via credit/debit card as they apparently allow with ACH.
There was nothing stopping them from sticking it to their “competitors” (that really aren’t when you get right down to it) by continuing to offer the discount and reject the moves initiated by Verizon and T-Mobile much the same way as airlines that try to hike fares too much can get punished brutally by the others if they don’t all go along with it.
Nothing stopping them except their own greed, that is.
Capitalism. Yay.