How to avoid a $400 "free" ISP phone bill
Dong Xie, an Illinois software engineer, signed up for AltaVista's free Internet access service a month ago. This month he got a nasty surprise in his mail--a $400 phone bill.
Suspecting a scam of some kind, he immediately called his phone company and AltaVista, but was told he had been using a "local toll" number--essentially a long distance number that was in the same area code, but not close enough to be a genuine local toll-free call.
Xie had fallen into a trap common to unwary Internet users, and one that has become increasingly dangerous with the advent of free ISP services. Because users can easily download and sign up for services like AltaVista or NetZero, many people are tempted to skip the step of reading the specifics of their user agreements.
And that, as Xie found out, can be a costly mistake. AltaVista gave him a list of apparently local calls to access their service, and he chose one at random. But not all calls that appear to be local are, in fact, free. Xie was charged 7 cents per minute while on the Net--all while using a number inside his own area code.
Most ISPs user agreements prominently point out the dangers of toll calls to keep this type of
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