Jud Patterson lives in a remote area of Smithfield where there is no regular internet, so he relies on Wi-Fi hot spots. One sits at home with unlimited data, and the other is in his shop on the property. Patterson adds, "It had a 50 gigabyte data limit, and I thought, well, that's no problem because I'll never use that much up there anyway. I'm not streaming video or anything like that."
When the battery in the hot spot in his home went dead, he went for a replacement. "I'll just go get the hot spot up at the shop and bring it down here, and then go get a new battery, and everything can be fine," Patterson adds. Everything was fine-until he started getting messages that he had reached his data limit and it would be $10 for another five gigabytes of data.
Patterson says, "As I saw that message, I went to the AT&T store, and I said, 'Look at this message, what is this?' and he said, 'Oh, that looks like a spam message to me. I wouldn't worry about it. Just ignore it.'" He continued to do just that, but the messages kept coming. Then he received a bill for more than $1,700 for data usage.
Patterson says he went back to the AT&T store. "The next guy I talked to, he said, 'Oh, well, that's because the hotspot and you've got a 50 gig limit on the hotspot.' And then it hit me what had happened."
Once Patterson put a new battery in his hotspot with unlimited data, he never put it back in his home. Instead, he continued using the shop's hotspot with only 50 gigabytes of data and went well over that limit each month, causing the large bill. "So fundamentally I was at fault, but because I was told to ignore those messages, I felt like they bore responsibility too because if I had known at the time, I would have swapped them right back," Patterson adds.
Patterson called AT&T and said he was told not to worry about the bill and that it would be taken care of. Instead, he says, a few weeks later, his phone was shut off. He says that to get it turned back on, he had to pay the bill in full. Patterson paid it and says he went back to calling AT&T.
He adds to Troubleshooter Diane Wilson, "They said, 'Ok, we'll take care of it, don't worry, and you'll see something, an email in a few days,' nothing, so I decided to call you."
Wilson contacted AT&T, and the company provided this statement: "We aim to provide excellent customer service experiences and acknowledge that we fell short in this instance. We apologized to this customer and worked with him to address his concerns with his account. For details on how to check your wireless usage, please visit Check Your AT&T Wireless Usage - AT&T Wireless Customer Support."
Patterson says he was shocked by how quickly he heard from AT&T. He says they couldn't have been nicer and gave him a credit on his bill for $1,870. He said to Wilson, "Just thank you. I mean, that was magic."