Family Fights $18K Verizon Bill

A Massachusetts family is locked in a standoff with Verizon over an $18,000 bill they accidentally racked up in just over a month. When the St. Germain family signed on with Verizon, they received 2 years of unlimited downloads as part of a promotion, the Boston Globe explains. When they re-signed, they say, no one told them the “promotion” was over. So son Bryan, who was away at college, kept right on using his phone to connect his laptop to the internet.

When the dust cleared, Bryan had downloaded 1,191,000 KB of data, for a cost of $17,833. “You can't print what my husband said,” says Mary St. Germain. After much haggling, Verizon agreed to cut the bill in half, but a state utility official advised them not to pay. “Never in my 25 years here have I seen such stubborn and senseless resistance to what is obviously a mistake,” he wrote. (More Verizon stories.)