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posted by martyb on Friday May 29 2020, @03:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the customer-disservice dept.

US cable subscribers are still being 'ripped off' by creeping price increases – and this lot has had enough:

In many ways it’s a rite of passage in America: being ripped off by your cable company and trying to figure out how they did it. Now a lawsuit against Charter Communications is seeking to uncover just that.

The biggest scam of all – pressuring or forcing subscribers to “rent” the clunky, technologically outdated cable box at a greatly inflated price – is still in place, despite a brief effort by the FCC in 2016 to shut it down.

And then there are hidden costs – such as “broadcast TV fees” and “regional sports fees” – raking in tens of millions of dollars in pure profit for unscrupulous cable companies, despite Consumer Reports focusing on the topic for a number of years, and now Congress even starting to pay attention.

But although we have all grown used to our cable fees rocketing the second you are off the special two-year contract rate, requiring you to call up the company and threaten to move to a competitor until you are offered the next incredible special deal, Charter may have pushed things too far with its latest special offer: a two-year flat fee deal that somehow, it is claimed, grew more expensive every month.

Five Charter Communications customers, based in Ohio and Kentucky, have formally accused [PDF] the company of a bait-and-switch scam for its cable TV service. The biz advertised a fixed monthly rate, they say, but far from being fixed, every few months it cost a little more.

Are the cable companies to blame, or the sports and movie channels that are charging more?


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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by SpockLogic on Friday May 29 2020, @12:57PM (2 children)

    by SpockLogic (2762) on Friday May 29 2020, @12:57PM (#1000503)

    When Time Warner became Speculum (or something like that) and they were bought by Charter, I got fed up with the constant price rise for cable TV and decided to cancel. I called and was shunted off to a retention specialist. The drone started off by trying to be chatty and reading the script with “ Let me pull up your details, it won’t take a moment … and while we are waiting what sort of TV do you like watching most? I exploded with “What TV I watch is none of your fucking business. Your job is to cancel my cable subscription, are we quite clear.” It only took a few more minutes and I dumped their equipment back at their office later that day.

     

     

    I still get regular mailers and calls from them trying to sell cable, streaming or cell service with dishonest and deceptive clams of fixed pricing and no mention of the bullshit fees that are hidden in the small print. When called my response is to immediately ask "Does your mother know you lie to people for a living?” That ends the conversation.

     

     

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  • (Score: 2) by Booga1 on Sunday May 31 2020, @12:57AM (1 child)

    by Booga1 (6333) on Sunday May 31 2020, @12:57AM (#1001233)

    A Comcast rep stopped by here a few months back and knocked on our door. "We noticed you don't have Comcast! Would you like to get fast cable internet and TV," he asked...
    I told him we weren't interested. When pushed for the reason why, I said something along the lines of "Comcast isn't a good company. They haven't treated me well, and they've done a lot of things I don't agree with."
    The guy of course asks, "Like what?" I told him he didn't have enough time in the day for me to cover it all and they should just move on.
    At that point my roommate had come out and the guy asked him, "Would you like to get Comcast?" My roommate said, "I don't have anything nice to say about them and just talking about them makes me mad."
    Apparently that was enough to clue the guy in that there were no sales opportunities at our place. I do have to wonder how much the individual sales reps know about the company they're working for.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2020, @08:45AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2020, @08:45AM (#1001304)

      The door-to-door ones work on commission with a low base. They don't care because if they did, they'd have never taken the job.