Approximately 700 residents from the American state of California may have just hit the jackpot thanks to a class-action suit that will award all of them a check of at least $1000 and possibly more in some cases in order to compensate these residents for any overcharges on their landline bills. These overcharges would originally have been merely a fraction of the money that is going to be awarded to them.
This compensation has been awarded to the people who replied to an advertisement published across the state in 2011 asking for people who owned AT&T’s residential landline units in California between August of 2001 and March of 2003 to come forward. A federal jury had found in late 2008 that AT&T might have charged its long distance customers in California more USF, or Universal Service Fund fees than it was allowed to during the 20 month period between the aforementioned times. This jury then awarded around $17 million in damages. This figure was later reduced to around $11 million by a district court.
AT&T was then ordered to set up a new fund in order to repay these victims. However, instead of using their own records to track down these victims, AT&T instead opted to use web and newspaper ads to track them down. Anyone who replied with a claim that was proved to be valid before the cut-off date of April 29, 2011 could receive an amount anywhere between $500 and $1000 per phone line owned, and this would depend on the number of people who responded to the claim.
While AT&T quite possibly had millions of such customers with multiple residential landlines in between that 20 month period, only about 6,950 people with around 9,050 lines submitted claims that were subsequently proved to be valid. As a result of that action, beginning this month, each of the respondents with proven claims will start getting the maximum amount allowed per phone line, which is $1000 per phone line. This is an award that is far beyond any actual damages that most customers might have suffered in that 20 month period, according to analysts. Mark Cooper, who is the director of research at the CFA, or the Consumer Federation of America, has equated this move to AT&T running a lottery in which everyone who bought a ticket ended up on the winning side of the equation.
