As hard as it may be to believe that are still more than two million people in the United States that are still paying for AOL’s dial up service in this day and age. Ron Dorff, an 83 year old Los Angeles resident is one of them. Now we’ve all experienced bill shock at some point in our lives but imagine the shock he got when he found out that AT&T had billed him $24,298 for AOL dial up.
Dorff’s matter was first reported by The Los Angeles Times. He uses the dial up service through an AT&T landline and the service costs him $51 per month. It would obviously make no sense for him to be charged more than $24,000 for a service that doesn’t cost much so certainly there was a glitch somewhere.
Imagine Dorff’s reaction when he got the $8,596.57 bill with a subsequent $15,687,64 charge. He reached out to customer support but as expected, they weren’t exactly helpful.
The Times’ report doesn’t offer much details as to how this happened, but apparently the gentleman’s modem was misconfigured to dial a long distance number which thus racked up substantial charges which Dorff remained online.
AT&T was asked by the paper why it didn’t stop the billing if an anomaly had been noticed, the company said that this is a rare occurrence and will be addressed on an individual basis, however the company didn’t answer whether its system is capable of spotting unusual charges.
As for Droff’s $24,000 bill, the company’s spokeswoman went as far as to suggest that these preposterous charges will be dropped.