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I worked for T-mobile a few years back, and during that time I handled close to 40,000 calls (give or take). Some of the calls that i took were ridiculous. I can honestly say that the efforts made to scam customers were only matched by the scams many customers attempted to take money from the company. I have worked for 3 different cell phone companies over the years, and none of them was perfect. But I’ll never forget some of the $5,000 dollar T-mobile bills I’ve seen, and the stories behind them.

One man went to a trip in Europe, and had his cell phone with him. He knew he would be charged the international rate, so he declined/rejected each and every call that came to him. He was charged not only the excessive international rate (about 15X more than it would have cost him to add a $10 or so international calling feature), but he was also charged several dollars per call in “call forwarding” since technically the calls is “forwarded” back to the U.S.

If he would have added a “calling” feature and answered the calls (and susequently hung up), he would have spent something like $50. But instead after all the charges were added up it was something like $1,000, for NOT answering the call. There are one time (one month) per year or life of account rerate fixes, but this type of stuff is common. It’s wacky some of the ingenius garbage that cell phone companies can come up with.

I should add that I have seen charges that were similar with landline companies as well, but nothing on the order of the 3 cell companies that I worked for (T-Mobile was by far the worst).