Lawsuit Says Callers Overcharged At&T; Accused Of Bilking Customers Out Of Billions

AT&T Corp. is being accused in a lawsuit of bilking millions of residential long-distance customers by billing them billions of dollars for telephone time never used.

AT&T does not tell those customers they are billed by the minute and that the time spent on the phone is rounded up to the next minute, the suit in state court alleges. A call that lasts one minute and one second, for example, is billed as a two-minute call, unlike business calls, it says.

The plaintiffs are Lawrence Marcus of the Philadelphia suburb of Bala Cynwyd, and Marc Kasky of San Francisco. But the suit asks for class-action status on behalf of the millions of residential AT&T customers nationwide.

It seeks to recover damages of up to $50,000 per class member.

John Skalko, spokesman for AT&T’s residential long distance service, on Friday denied any attempt to deceive customers, calling the residential billing practice an “industry standard.”

But the suit complains that AT&T bills businesses in sixsecond intervals for long-distance calls, so that a call that lasts one minute and one second is billed as a one-minute-and-six-second call.

Michael Spencer, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said some smaller long-distance carriers offer residential users the same billing system - every six seconds - that AT&T offers businesses.

Skalko said it is true that some businesses are billed differently than consumers. “There is an offering for business customers who engage in the transmission of small bursts of data where this is a benefit to them,” he said.

“The average business call is 2.5 minutes; the average consumer call is about eight minutes,” Skalko said. “Because of this pattern, subminute billing doesn’t make sense for most consumers.”

The lawsuit says the exact length of a call is not disclosed anywhere on a customer’s bill. “By its non-disclosure, AT&T has fraudulently collected billions of dollars of toll charges,” court papers say, adding that the “illgotten gains” were collected by violating New York’s General Business Law.