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posted by janrinok on Thursday September 19 2019, @01:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the you-might-have-an-account! dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow6430

Lawsuit: AT&T signed customers up for DirecTV Now without their knowledge

AT&T supervisors encouraged sales reps to create fake DirecTV Now accounts to make the online video service seem more successful than it really was, a class-action complaint alleges.

AT&T "promot[ed] and reward[ed] account fraud" such as creating the fake accounts and signing AT&T customers up for DirecTV Now "without the customer knowing," the lawsuit claims.

The new allegations were made Friday in an amended complaint as part of a lawsuit filed against AT&T in April in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The lawsuit alleges that AT&T lied to investors in order to hide DirecTV Now's failure.

"AT&T misrepresented the true condition of DirecTV Now and hid the associated risks," the amended complaint says. DirecTV Now's inevitable failure was subsequently made clear when subscriber numbers began to drop, the amended complaint says:

The dramatic decline in DirecTV Now subscriber numbers was a materialization of the risks associated, including: improper sales practices, such as the creation of fake accounts, which predictably led subscribers to cancel these accounts, upon realizing they were being billed for a service they did not use; the aggressive use of promotional campaigns to artificially sustain subscriber levels; and selling the product at irrationally low prices that would ultimately need to increase.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Thursday September 19 2019, @01:53AM (3 children)

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Thursday September 19 2019, @01:53AM (#895961) Journal

    is this just more of the same and I just can't remember earlier instances?

    No, nothing has changed since we crawled out of the ooze. It was just easier to cover up in the old days when information channels were more limited.

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    La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday September 19 2019, @02:54AM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Thursday September 19 2019, @02:54AM (#895971) Journal

    I often asked my elders if morality has declined. And from all I've heard, no, on the whole, things have improved. It can be very hard to tell, what with the evening news and their relentless focus on sensational crime. But consider that lynchings are now very rare. 100 years ago, there might be 2 or 3 lynchings every week. They were very public affairs, with dozens of people complicit in the murders, only getting away with it because society as a whole condoned the activity. They would even take pictures and print them on postcards. The murderers faces, right there, on dozens of postcards, and no one did a thing to bring them to justice. Today, I am sure being so public and getting away with it would be impossible. The torturers who indulged their sick desires at Abu Ghraib learned that.

    I would also like to point to medicine as another area that used to be a lot more dirty from an ethical standpoint, what with all those infamous snake oil treatments. And yet, medicine is still plenty dirty, so that doesn't make for the best argument.

    Cameras everywhere make it much harder to get away with all kinds of petty crimes. DNA testing is another big factor. What that has really done is make it impossible to deny and cover up a great deal of crime that used to be more common.

    Finally, social safety nets and improved health are factor. It is really amazing the effect that phasing out leaded gasoline has had on crime levels. Lead poisoning makes the victims more prone to violence, and lowers their intelligence.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @02:32PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19 2019, @02:32PM (#896091)

      While I'm glad we've stopped physically lynching people, it's been my observation that the frequency and participation rate of internet character assassinations has been on the rise.

      Consider what just happened to Stallman. His life was substantially altered in a negative way by an angry mob because of an accusation that he holds beliefs which there does not seem to be evidence that he holds.

      It seems to me to be the same part of the brain, and I'm not sure as a society we're improving it.

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday September 19 2019, @08:04AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 19 2019, @08:04AM (#896010) Journal

    No, nothing has changed since we crawled out of the ooze

    I crawled out of muck, you insensitive clod!

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    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford