Dave Pollard's essays on politics & economics.



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  July 4, 2004


.Add AT&T to your Boycott List. This outfit has been running a nationwide phony billing scam, and are now into Enron-and-Bush style denial, blame-passing and damage control. It seems this company sent out over a million phony bills -- most of them non-customers, and then set up a cumbersome, non-responsive and threatening telephone response systems to wear down and intimidate irate victims of the scheme into paying the bills. "A computer failure" has been blamed for the "errors", which in total dwarf, both in size and criminality, anything Martha Stewart did. Several states' Attorneys General have filed suit against AT&T for fraud and deceptive practices, but don't expect to see any AT&T executives in jail.

Bottom line -- If you get a bill from AT&T, whether you're a customer or not -- check it carefully, and if it's part of this fraud, don't pay it, and complain to the BBB, to the state Public Service Commission, to the state Attorney General's Office, and to the FCC. Better still, play it safe -- find a reputable phone company, and then you'll know for sure any bill you get from AT&T is fraudulent. Why is it that legislators are so hot to stamp out spam and Internet porn, but aren't interested in protecting citizens from giant fraudulent predator corporations like AT&T (and criminal polluters like Koch Industries)? Do you think it might be because these corporations pour millions into the legislators' election campaigns?


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