AT & T Fraudulently Changes Its Bill Due Date Without Notice & Then Charges A Late Fee

Looking for an image to illustrate my disgust at an AT & T likely illegal billing practice I soon saw I was not alone in my contempt for AT & T.

Didn't AT & T recently get fined for some sort of fraudulent practice?

Well. I think AT & T is in need of another fine, along with some sort of refund to the customers who AT & T's racketeering type billing defrauded of funds.

What triggers a federal RICO racketeering investigation? Let me describe AT & T's sleazy scheme and see what you think.

The bill due date for my AT & T U Verse Internet account had been the 13th of the month, ever since I signed on to the service. A few months ago the due date was advanced a day, with no notice or explanation.

Then the due date was advanced another day. I paid that month's bill a day late due to the bill due date being arbitrarily changed. No "late fee" was charged, that time.

But, when I went to pay this month's bill I found the due date had been advanced again, now with the bill due date being the 8th of the month.

Plus a $9.95 overdue fee had been added to the previous month's bill, which I had paid a day after that month's changed bill due date.

Yesterday I contacted AT & T's customer service chat line. After about 20 minutes someone came online. I explained the problem. The AT & T customer service person said the bill due dates had been changed for uniformity within their system. This sounded ridiculous to me, and so I said so.

I also questioned the legality. The customer service person removed the overdue fee and changed the bill due date back to original.

Now, here is where the racketeering fraud comes in.

How many customers has AT & T done this to? How many customers have paid this bogus "late" fee without a complaint?

How many millions of dollars has AT & T defrauded its customers of, with this clearly fraudulent billing practice?

For October Google AdSense Payment in Progress is Stuck in Limbo

To the left you are looking at a screencap from my Google AdSense account. Note that on Oct. 21 Automatic payment was in progress.

That payment was direct deposited in my bank by the morning of Oct. 23.

And yet it is now Oct. 26 and my AdSense account is still indicating the Automatic payment is in progress.

That and the account has not been updated with the new Current Balance and the new Most Recent Payment.

Plus if you look at a report for today, or the month, you find that Estimated Earnings, Page Views, Clicks, Page CTR, CPC, Page RPM  are all N/A, as in Not Available.

One can send feedback to Google, but one gets no feedback back.

It can be frustrating. Like when Google "Updated" AdSense with a new, supposed, improved account view. With that we lost easy access to the current day's stats. We lost easily seeing the month's total revenue. Instead we get stats like "Last 7 days" and "Last 28 days".

There is a Google Adsense Payments Forum which is very useful, with Google Adsense users from all over the world sharing their experience. From that forum I learned that PIP (Payment in Progress) being currently stuck is a world-wide issue.

When Google makes a payment they also send an email informing that a payment has been made. That has also been missing this month.

I wish the Google AdSense operation were more transparent and that there was a way to more directly contact some sort of support system.

It will be interesting to see how this current confusion plays out. And if we ever get a Google explanation for that which is perplexing AdSense publishers across the globe....

Getting a New Samsung Phone from Metro PCS was a Painless Process Compared to Dealing with AT & T

Up til last August I got my AT & T cell phone service through a Fort Worth agent called Hawk Electronics. In 2013 Hawk Electronics went bankrupt. During the bankruptcy process I was told my cell phone service would smoothly transition to being handled directly by AT & T.

That proved to be un-true. I did not like the way AT & T handled, or mishandled the transition, so I transitioned out of having AT & T being my cell phone service provider.

For several months a Google phone was my phone option. This is not a mobile option. Unless one wants to haul ones laptop from its home location to some other wi-fi connection from which one can make a call.

By February of 2014 I was tired of the Google phone and not being mobile, so I walked across the street to a Metro PCS store which I'd long noticed and which recently was advertising Smart Phones for $29.99. And $40 a month for unlimited talk, text and data.

My last experience with getting a new phone had been at Hawk Electronics, a very bad experience which took a couple hours. It was bizarre. I was not shocked when I learned Hawk Electronics had gone bankrupt.

With Hawk Electronics being my previous phone acquisition experience I sort of dreaded what type of time suck nightmare Metro PCS would be.

Well.

Totally opposite of my Hawk Electronics experience. No wait. I walked in the store and within seconds I was in the getting a new phone process. About ten minutes later I walked out with my new phone. The process would have been even shorter had I not been having fun talking to the Metro PCS sales lady.

One of the things I did not like about Hawk Electronics and AT & T was the billing and payment method. Once a month I'd log into my account to view the bill. Often there would be charges which made no sense which I would have to hassle over to get removed. The bill would fluctuate for no explicable reason. The bill had a long list of charges, surcharges, taxes and fees.

So, I logged into my online account to pay my first Metro PCS bill to find there really was no bill. Just fill in credit card info and pay $40.00. I did so. The next month I got a text message advising me that my bill  was due and that I could pay it by texting "PAY 40.00". I did so and instantly got a text message thanking me.

Like I already said, Metro PCS has been dead opposite of the phone experience I had for years with Hawk Electronics and AT & T.

As for learning to use a Smart Phone. I'd never used my previous phone to send a text message. I may have received a text message or two. With the Smart Phone I was pleasantly surprised to find out both how easy it is to text message, and how useful it turns out to be.

I had no idea, til using one, that a Smart Phone is basically a very small, very powerful computer that can pretty much do anything I can do on my laptop. Except blog. The Blogger app for the Smart Phone does not seem usable to me. Maybe I need to give it a longer try, because blogging on the go would be fun....