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Networking

Last year, Wells Fargo was defenseless in a major scandal when it came to light that employees had been signing consumers up for fraudulent bank accounts past the millions. The employees did this to hit quotas and cross-selling targets, but often forgot to cancel the false accounts, which resulted in harm to customer credit. The company was fined $185 meg, is facing diverse criminal and ceremonious suits, and its CEO resigned in disgrace.

A old CenturyLink employee is alleging that the Internet service provider used a similar tactic in a new courtroom filing. According to her, she was terminated after making a mail service on a company bulletin lath, when she reported to CEO Glen Postal service that some customers were being bilked with unauthorized charges, adding upwardly to "many millions" over the by two years. The woman who filed the case, Heidi Heiser, alleges a Wells Fargo-like scheme, where employee pay and bonuses were directly tied to cross-selling products.

The case states that employees had "a personal incentive to add together services or lines to customer accounts to falsely point on the CenturyLink system approval by a customer of new lines or services, which would inure to the direct or indirect do good of such CenturyLink agents or their superiors." Furthermore, CenturyLink'southward policy was to refuse to acknowledge that customers had not agreed to these services and to demand payment through the date of the initial complaint. In other words, if you got billed for a bunch of stuff you lot never signed up for, y'all were nonetheless expected to pay the nib through your complaint date.

CenturyLink_coverage_map

CenturyLink'due south coverage map

Now CenturyLink is facing a class-action lawsuit seeking up to $12 billion in damages. That award would be boggling, but the second lawsuit claims it's a fair corporeality based on how long complaints have been stacking up and the number of customers CenturyLink has (5.9 million). In fairness, it's less crazy than it sounds. If the average client's beak was inflated by $ten per month for three years, that'due south $2.124 billion in unfair, fraudulent fees. If the average inflation over time was $12 for a v year menstruum, that's $4.25 billion. Slap on some amercement, and you lot've got a hefty amount of coin in play. CenturyLink is denying all charges and painting Heiser as a disgruntled employee.

"The fact that a police force firm is trying to leverage a wrongful termination suit into a putative class action lawsuit does not modify our original position," Mark Molzen, a CenturyLink spokesman, said in a statement, calculation that Heiser failed to written report her allegations to the visitor's 24-60 minutes Integrity Line. He said her claims "are completely inconsistent" with company policy and culture and that "we accept these allegations seriously and are diligently investigating this affair."

The problem with CenturyLink's counter-argument is that it'due south all besides easy to find examples of other ISPs and companies doing precisely what it'southward defendant of doing. Wells Fargo is a major example, but it'southward far from the simply one. Telcos have been fined repeatedly in recent years for 'cramming' or stuffing fees that customers never agreed to into their cell telephone bills. Verizon literally leaves its ain copper infrastructure to rot, in the hopes of avoiding its obligations to its customers.

Time and once again, ISPs have demonstrated consummate antipathy for their own customers, even going and so far as to openly admit that their data caps are just a means to squeeze additional coin from users rather than whatever kind of network management or QoS tool. In this kind of climate, information technology's hard to give these companies the do good of the dubiousness; non when they've spent and then much time and effort destroying the very notion of skillful faith.