Ever since her divorce, Sandye Linnetz has kept an eye on her budget.  When interest rates lower, she negotiates a better payment plan.  She is tech-savvy and cleans her own house.

So when a questionable $9.99 monthly charge showed up on her Verizon Wireless bill after renewing her contract, Linnetz took a closer look.  The charge had no description, she said, just a code, and she wanted to know what it was for.

A Verizon agent told her it was for monthly phone insurance (insuring that Verizon gets paid?), Linnetz said, adding that she didn’t request it.

“The customer service rep said, ‘That’s funny (who’s laughing, Verizon?), they may have automatically put it on,’” said Linnetz, who had the charge credited.

“I don’t think it was an accident.”

Linnetz is one of many U.S. consumers who said they have noticed unauthorized charges appearing on their phone, cable and even shopping bills.  Like Linnetz, some of them believe that companies are intentionally “upselling” their customers with extraneous services, hoping that the charges will go undetected.

“This kind of thing has been ongoing for some time,” said Gary Almond, director of the Better Business Bureau of Los Angeles, explaining that he has often seen companies add services to their customers’ bills without consent in his 20 years of working at the bureau.

“It’s a profit center for most businesses,” Almond said.

Such incidents of upselling are especially egregious because the charges are initiated by the companies themselves, not by third-party vendors who fraudulently smuggle themselves into bills in the rapidly growing practice of “cramming.”

If this doesn’t make you mad, I don’t know what will!  How long are you going to sit back and take it?  There is more of us than them, even though they are the ones with all of the money!  Wake up America!

cf http://abcnews.go.com/Business/companies-add-services-bills-consent-consumers/story?id=9628564