I really do feel like corporations are increasingly trying to scam people, where they put in false and inflated charges and try to avoid doing stuff in writing and just overall they try to make you fight it, in really insidious and nasty ways.
Like, after my recent ambiguous car damage with Enterprise, they sent me a hugely inflated bill for like $2500 that included charges that weren’t contractually valid like lost use and depreciation, and they tried to fold in repairing random pre-existing dints that fell below the contractual damage threshold, and beyond all of that they could never provide the damage report that I filed by phone the day after the damage even though the staffer on the phone said that it was time-stamped for insurance purposes and that I could get it later from the local franchise.
(“They did this to you because you were a nice guy,” my [West African] mailman told me, saying that I should never have reported any marginal damage at all, in the first place.)
I mean, I sent a letter and challenged the bill and they ended up waiving all the charges, but the whole thing was just slimy, like Enterprise wasn’t even trying to read the contract and do the right thing, but instead just used it as an excuse to try to run up charges and fuck you and/or whatever insurance you carried.
It brought back memories of the anesthesiologist that I had for my first required-by-my-family-history colonoscopy, where they were out-of-network but they legally could only charge in-network, but they sent me an out-of-network bill anyways and they would never run it through insurance even though I demanded that in writing, and then they sold the bill off to medical debt companies like it was valid debt when it wasn’t that at all, it was just some made-up charges.
(“The scam is real,” my one [art school] colleague who wears [women’s] clothes said when I showed him the bill and told him about the situation.)
Then, the debt companies wouldn’t run it through insurance because that should have been done by the provider, not them, and it was just like this zombie bill with no validity that I got a letter about every once in a while and that lasted until like 2-3 years later when a local church bought up the medical debt for pennies on the dollar and waived it as some sort of jubilee initiative, which is nice, I guess, but which also makes me wonder how much of medical debt figures that you see cited around everywhere are due to this fraudulent billing and not due to people’s actual need and inability to pay.
And, that hit me totally like a story that I saw in a local newspaper, where a local ambulance company appeared to have been automatically billing people improperly for out-of-network services and then making them fight it, rather than trying to actually bill what was actually legally valid and actually owed…
And, that reminded me how several years ago at the tail end of the pandemic I had a Greyhound busride to a nearby big city and they never sent the bus but they also never officially canceled it and so they tried to claim that their policies don’t offer refunds for delayed busses, and I had to contact the state attorney general’s office to get my ticket price back.
Like, they were trying to not produce paperwork by which you could show that the bus was canceled, so as to to attempt to just improperly keep your money! Like, you can’t set up a bus or a plane and sell tickets and then cancel the service and keep all the money, but that’s what Greyhound was trying to do!
I also recently had an experience with my electrical supplier, where after my yearly contract expired they were jacking the kilowatt hour price by 25-30% and so I switched to community solar but couldn’t be placed right away, and so I called my previous supplier to cancel out my contract at the designated number and left the message, but they never canceled my contract and I ended up getting my next electricity bill at that higher usorious price.
And, when I called again, that same number was also busy with no reps available, and it again led me to a voicebox to leave a message and no-one ever called me back from there.
Like, they must deliberately set it up that way, so it seems like you can cancel your contract, but it doesn’t leave a written record and they can continue on with their services and overcharge you!
This density of interactions with slimy companies is just astonishing to me – this must have always been around, but it seems to be getting worse…
I was mentioning this to my mom, and she said she recently had a $35 surprise “phone transfer” fee when she had to get a new smartphone, and she had to fight that, too, since no-one ever told her that that was a thing when she was buying her new phone, even though the older lady who helped her set up her new phone was very honest and very good and helped her quickly and well with everything.
What a world we live in.
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