⇥ Reality is much worse than fiction

Every now and then, I come across a news item—like this—which talks about some poor guy (or gal) somewhere who had the distinctly unpleasant surprise of receiving a $25,000 bill because his or her phone was stolen and used to call Namibia, or Peru, or the Moon.

I feel for those people—I really do. I’ve paid a $20,000 telco bill a few times (alas, all legitimately billed) and I know how painful it is when you expect it… so, I can only imagine how horrible it must be when you don’t.

On the surface, this looks like pure greed on behalf of phone companies that will do whatever they can to screw the little guy. Sure, it’s your responsibility to monitor your phone usage, but it’s trivial for the phone company to put an automatic block on your account when you go, say, 10% over your average monthly spending for the last 12 months (incidentally, the company I use, Fido, does this by default—an act of uncharacteristic decency for a company owned by the worst media conglomerate in Canada). The credit card industry has done it and, realistically, it should be at most a handful of lines of code.

However, let me give you this little story from my bag of “I can’t believe I once heard this” tales. About seven or eight years ago, I did some work for a telco—whose name shall remain unnamed in order to protect the innocent, the guilty and the NDA I signed. One of the subprojects—for which, luckily, I wasn’t responsible—was the ability to bill customers directly on their phone bill.

This involved interfacing with the department that handles the billing system, which claimed—I kid you not—that adding a new revenue centre to said billing system required a whopping seven months of notice.

If adding a new item to a phone bill can “take” seven months, I will let you imagine the massive amount of time and resources that implementing a simple anti-fraud system can require. It’s just the way these companies roll—which is, unfortunately, much sadder than if they were actually trying to screw people over.