If our customers complain, you can take your billing elsewhere.
That's Pacific Bell's message to companies that bill consumers for third-party telecom services using the Baby Bell's customer billing system.
Pac Bell issued a warning Wednesday to companies that generate the most complaints about "cramming" -- unauthorized charges for third-party services appearing on customer bills.
"Our goal is to significantly cut cramming complaints in 90 days, and we ultimately hope to soon eliminate it altogether," said Dick Oxler, Pac Bell's director of billing and collections, in a statement.
Third-party companies can contract with Pac Bell to bill for additional telecom products and services, such as paging and faxing. Cramming occurs when the charges show up for products or services that consumers either never ordered or didn't receive.
Oxler said the goal of the strengthened cramming policy is to prevent new problems while the company addresses existing ones.
The FCC has been encouraging Baby Bells to take the kind of action Pacific Bell took Wednesday. It wants phone companies to take up the cramming issue with the providers in questions and give them a warning.
Providers causing most of the complaints to Pacific Bell have 90 days to fix things or face termination of their billing contracts. Pacific Bell said it has stopped billing for more than 40 service providers that have generated excessive complaints.
During the 90-day crackdown, Pacific Bell will not allow targeted providers to bill for any new products or services.
"It's good to see Pacific Bell stop cramming," said Becky Sachs, a spokeswoman for the Telecommunications Research and Action Center, a consumer organization focusing on telecom issues. "...Clearly, Pacific Bell is doing what the FCC has encouraged companies to do to stop cramming."
Whether the action will be enough to stop cramming is unclear to TRAC.
On both cramming and slamming -- the unauthorized switching of consumers' long-distance providers -- TRAC is advocating the attachment of PIN numbers to consumer accounts. The PIN number would help ensure that only consumers can authorize charges debited on their bills.
"If we moved toward a system like that we would see an end to problems like cramming and slamming," Sachs said.
Meanwhile, Pac Bell is also demanding that companies using its consumer billing service stay below certain thresholds or face termination of their contracts.
Pacific Bell also announced a billing policy change designed to continue removing the financial incentive for slamming.
Under the new policy, Pacific Bell will remove all slamming charges from customers' bills, then instruct offending providers not to use Pacific Bell's billing service to collect any money from the slamming victim.
