Companies Add Services to Bills Without Consent, Consumers Say

Feb. 1, 2010— -- Ever since her divorce a few years ago, Sandye Linnetz has kept her finances on a tight leash. When interest rates fall, she asks her credit card company for a better deal. She fixes her own computer and cleans her own house.

So when a mysterious $9.99 monthly charge appeared on her Verizon Wireless bill a few weeks after she renewed her contract, Linnetz did a double-take. The charge came without a description, she said, just a confusing jumble of letters, and she wanted to know what it covered.

A Verizon agent told her it was for monthly phone insurance, Linnetz said, adding that she never signed up for it.

"The customer service rep said, 'That's funny, they may have automatically put it on,'" said Linnetz, who had the charge canceled.

"I don't think it was an accident."

Linnetz is one of many U.S. consumers who said they have noticed unauthorized charges appearing on their phone, cable and even shopping bills. Like Linnetz, some of them believe that companies are intentionally "upselling" their customers with unnecessary services and hoping that the charges will go undetected.

"This kind of thing has been ongoing for some time," said Gary Almond, director of the Better Business Bureau of Los Angeles, explaining that he has often seen companies add services to their customers' bills without consent in his 20 years of working at the bureau.

"It's a profit center for most businesses," Almond said.

Such incidents of aggressive upselling are especially egregious because the charges are initiated by the companies themselves, not by third-party vendors who fraudulently smuggle themselves into bills in the rapidly growing practice of "cramming."