DirecTV Believed Unethical Billing

I fully understand that it is a business' goal to make money.  Some businesses do that by charging customers.  This is a perfectly valid and moral relationship.  The morality of this breaks down, however, when a business intentionally charges customers for a service they did not provide.  It is my opinion that consumers should refuse to do business with companies that have that business model.

I have recently discovered first hand that DirecTV has a business practice that I believe to be immoral.  If you be a moral person who is also a customer of DirecTV, I advise you to read on and decide for yourself if you can remain a customer of theirs.

Six months ago I suspended my DirecTV.  The way this works is that they stop putting charges on your bill, and they stop providing service, and at some date in the future, that service is reinstated automatically if the consumer does not take action.  I believed this practice to be designed to lure customers back in by automatically reactivating and maybe getting a little billing out of customers.  But I entered into this aware, knowing I would probably forget, get reactivated, charged for a few days, and then cancel.  We do not have room in our budget for DirecTV.  But I was hoping that would change over the six months.  At some point, that will change, and I will consume media again.  I can say that unless DirecTV takes action and based on my personal experience over the last 2 hours, I will not be a customer of theirs again.  Ever.

I get bills from DirecTV every month.  Since we suspended service, and since DirecTV advance bills for service, there was an 80 dollar credit on my account.  For the last 6 months or so, I have gotten a bill every month showing this credit.  DirecTV refused to refund me this money unless I cancelled the account outright, which should have been an indication to me that they were eventually going to unethically keep this money.  So here is how my bills looked:

From my gmail history, and echoed at DirecTV:

So you can see that I get a bill every month like clockwork.  This all makes sense at this point.  And I knew that at some point, they'd start charging me again.  I have now learned that service was reactivated on 4/26/2012.  Let me refresh one thing in your mind though:  DirecTV advance bills.  My 4/26 bill showed an $-80.08 credit.  My service reactivated on 4/26, so why did the 4/26 bill not show that?  Why was there not a charge?  Here is the 4/26 bill:

Note that there is no indication of services on the above bill.  It is April 26, and my service was reactivated on April 26.  This bill clearly states there are no charges (and you can see in the bill below that they do advance bill for service).  I believe this is consistent with a business practice designed to unethically take my money.

Compare that with my May 26 bill:

Now this was very interesting to me.  When I read this, what I believe to be going on is an attempt to empty out my credit without giving me a chance to respond.  If they advance bill, which they have always done up to this point in my experience, and are continuing to do from this point on, why were my April 26 - May 26 charges not on my April 26 bill?  They state it is because the service was suspended at that time.  I believe DirecTV is more competent than that.  I believe that billing was done in this way for the sole purpose of getting my $80 credit, and then some, without giving me a chance to respond.  I believe this is consistent with a business practice designed to unethically take my money.

DirecTV has been contacted, and refuse to refund the money.  I am was a potential future customer, and they refuse to refund a bill for a service I did not consume.  They claim that they notified me that the account was to be reactivated, and that they notified me of this on April 4th.  I use gmail for my e-mail, and gmail stores all emails unless you delete it.  I delete only spam.  The first picture that I posted in this article was a listing of all of my e-mail from DirecTV.  Note that no e-mail was listed from April 4.  I searched my e-mails from April 4 and received only 3, none of them were from DirecTV.  There is a chance that a spam filter caught it, but I find that unlikely if they follow consistent business practices.  I get e-mails from them every month that make it through the spam filter just fine.  From what I can tell, DirecTV did not send me this e-mail, which I believe is consistent with a business practice designed to unethically take my money.

This business practice only affects those who have suspended their service.  I think it is reasonable to say this group of people is primarily those without financial means to pay their bill.

I believe that All lines of evidence I can gather support the hypothesis that DirecTV has instituted billing practices designed to legally but unethically take money from the financially impaired.

If you are reading this and find it logically sound, please consider cancelling your DirecTV service if you have it, and consider publicizing this message through social media.