Completely unrelated to security, but was surprised when this happened to me so I thought I would throw out a heads up.
When you pay your credit card or mortgage, there are laws in place to (try) keep the creditors from gouging you. For example if you make a credit card payment, the creditor has to apply that payment to the oldest purchase. If they didn’t, they could easily whack you with higher interest and penalties by only paying off recent purchases. The law is designed to provide some level of consumer protection.
Apparently the same rules do not apply to Comcast. Back in June I went into the local Comcast office and picked up two new cable boxes. These made it onto my June bill, which I completely missed due to travel. I have my bank setup to make auto-payments, but the June auto-payment ended up being $18 short. Jump to July and I had the same problem. Didn’t look at the bill and just let auto-pay do its thing. Except now it is not just $18 short, it is $18 plus fees and penalties.
So here we are in August. Less than 30 days since I last made a payment and Comcast killed my service. Phone, TV and Internet all offline. When I called to find out the problem, I was told my account was 60 days overdue. After speaking with three different people I was told that Comcast has no such requirement to apply payments to oldest debts. So while my July bill was considered current, my June bill was considered 60 days overdue. Thus the interruption in service, as well as multiple fees to straighten the while thing out. If Comcast was held to the same standards as most creditors, I would still owe them $18. Because they are not, with their fee structure I now owe $47 and that number is still climbing (apparently their Tivo service cannot be turned back on without a service tech).
Postmortem
- Bundling home services can save money but makes for a nasty single point of failure
- Be careful using a Bank based auto-pay for bills that can vary
- Comcast fee structure permits them to earn an annual rate of return of 967% if you are so much as $1 overdue and miss it the following month
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