Imagine you are small business and you get a bill from your local phone company for $1000. You are shocked because your monthly bill is usually closer to $100 per month. The company claims that your higher bill is for the international calls that you made from your fax machine. "Hold on", you think. "I didn't make any international calls from my fax machine or from ANY phone. I didn't make any international calls at all!"

You protest but the phone company says that even though you didn't make the calls, someone was able to hack into your phone system and make the calls. "But wait", you exclaim, "I don't have a phone system. I don't have a PBX. I just have two phone lines provided by you".

"Ah, but you didn't take precautions to protect your phones from being hacked," responds the phone company.

"What precautions!", you reply. "I put international call blocking on my phone service".

An impossible scenario? Apparently not accordingly to Telepacific/MPower. It did almost exactly this to a San Diego-based flower shop. UCAN brought a formal complaint against Telepacific for this billing policy.

UCAN's complaint addresses the apparent practice of TelePacific (hereinafter TelePacific) imposing unauthorized direct dialing charges on customers who have not dialed the numbers appearing on their bills, providing no notice that international calls could be placed on the account, billing at unpublished rates significantly higher than the highest published rates, as well as misbilling customers at incorrect rates. UCAN asserts that these customers never dialed nor authorized anyone to dial these telephone numbers that they were billed for and that TelePacific improperly tried to collect the disputed charges and sent the customer to collections while the dispute was still pending. The customer brought an informal complaint with the California Public Utilities Commission’s Consumer Affairs Branch (“CAB”) but CAB failed to investigate the dispute beyond asking the company to respond to the complaint. Though CAB took no action beyond forwarding TelePacific’s response to the customer, there are too many inconsistencies with the facts and the situation to accept unchallenged TelePacific’s position that the billed unauthorized charges are the customer’s responsibility.

UCAN's complaint is current awaiting a decision by the Commission.   We'll let you know the outcome of the complaint when the Commission finally makes a decision -- they've dragged this case out for the better part of two years.