Validas: Kill Your Bill

don’t become just another story

On a semi-regular basis, a new particularly cringe-worthy and unfortunate story of some gigantic wireless bill emerges. Earlier this year, for example, one particularly popular anecdote centered on a father taking a hammer to the cell phone that his daughter used to rack up a $4,700 Verizon Wireless bill via massive texting. Another story that spread through the press was about an Alberta, Canada oilfield worker who thought that he could use his phone to download data to his computer and was subsequently hit with an C$85,000 bill. While his provider reduced the charges to C$3,400, the cash-strapped 22-year-old is still feeling the burn. Then there was the saga back in February of a guy who used his AT&T wireless card to download a Bears game while sitting on a cruise ship in Miami’s port. AT&T charged him international roaming rates for the download and subsequently billed him for $28,027.31. After wrangling and negotiating time and time again, AT&T finally accepted proof that when the game was downloaded the guy’s ship was still in port in Miami and so he should not have been charged international rates. Most of the giant bill was subsequently forgiven.

The latest addition to this collection of unfortunate wireless experiences comes from Hayward, California. Ted Estarija was apparently anticipating Verizon Wireless bills of around $50 per month extra when he added his 13-year-old son to his wireless plan. Media reports indicate that Estarija believed by limiting his son’s calling and texting, large charges would be avoided. Then came the $21,917.59 whopper-of-a-bill. Apparently Estarija’s son managed to rack up the charges through data downloading. Recently unemployed, Estarija reasoned with Verizon, who has since agreed to credit the giant charges.

Stories like these will always be popular because they speak to that certain shock-value many crave from a distance. We tend to be fascinated with misfortune—as long as we’re safely on the other side of the fence. Perhaps surprisingly, and certainly unfortunately, this is not necessarily the case, however, in terms of overblown wireless costs. That is, while we may think that we’re safe from $10,000 cell bills, up to 80 percent of wireless users are actually likely paying for plans not ideally optimized to their specific needs. So rather than isolated examples, these stories of enormous cell bills are actually merely the outliers that illustrate the extremes of what many wireless customers experience regularly in some form; a plan not tailored ideally to their usage and financial losses as a result.

By optimizing your wireless bill through Validas, you can be put securely on the other side of that fence where reading stories about cell bill mayhem is no longer an exercise in hearing about a more extreme version of what you experience on a monthly basis. Validas identifies how you use your wireless service and designs your plan around your needs. Don’t risk becoming the next wireless horror story, and try Validas today.