Health & Fitness
State Supreme Court Sticks Up for Phone Customers
Wisconsin Supreme Court rules that customers who have been unwittingly paying unauthorized charges can file a lawsuit to recover those payments.
Cramming — the practice of a telephone company sneaking small charges into your phone bill with innocuous-sounding names, without your permission, in the hopes that you'll pay them without noticing them.
In Wisconsin, such charges are illegal. Phone companies cannot "negatively" or "opt-out" bill you. They can only include charges you specifically authorize or those required by law (taxes, FCC fees, 9-1-1 charges, etc.)
In MBS-Certified Public Accountants, LLC v. Wisconsin Bell d/b/a AT&T Wisconsin, Inc., the Wisconsin Supreme Court decided that even if you voluntarilly pay those charges for years, you can still file a lawsuit seeking to recover those payments.
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While that seems a very obvious result, the legal issue was a little murkier. There is a common law doctrine (common law are the rules created by courts, not legislatures or administrative agencies) that says if you voluntarily pay somebody what they claim you owe, without protest, you can't later file a lawsuit to recover that money. The issue in this case was whether that common law doctrine (the "voluntary payment doctrine" or "VPD") could be applied to statutes banning cramming and other consumer-protection statutes.
The court decided that applying the VPD would defeat the purpose of the anti-cramming statute. Basically, the court pointed out that cramming itself is a sneaky, underhanded tactic designed to be as unnoticeable as possible. Requiring the customer to notice those innocuous-seeming charges and object to them would keep customers from having any meaningful remedy for those unauthorized charges.
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The court did not decide whether the VPD could be applied to the broader consumer protection statutes, sending the case back to the court of appeals to decide that issue.
Two justices — David Prosser and Michael Gableman — agreed in part and dissented in part. They agreed that the VPD could not be applied to the anti-cramming statute, but would have gone ahead and decided the legal question of whether it could be applied to the other consumer protection statutes.
