I can’t help feeling that telephone companies and Internet Service Providers are in real danger of legal action if they don’t tackle the problem of modem dialing.
This NBC5 story from Chicago quotes a local woman as complaining about a series of weird calls to her phone company, SBC. The answer: “They didn’t know too much about it. They said, ‘Well, you might want to check with your Internet provider,'” the customer recalled. Her ISP, AOL, wasn’t any more helpful. “The person said basically there was nothing they could do; these charges were not coming from them, therefore, they can’t credit us, they can’t help us,” the customer said.
Phone companies and, to a lesser extent, ISPs, can’t stick their heads in the sand on this. They mustn’t palm off customers with stupid answers, and they must investigate themselves the companies behind these scams. If they don’t, class action suits are bound to follow.