MONTREAL, Que. – Amber Hunter couldn’t afford to accept an invitation to spend New Year’s Eve in Miami last week because she’s using her savings to pay her Internet bill.
"I’m a student, and I work at a bar, and now most of the money I have goes to pay my Internet bill," the 21-year-old Notre Dame de Grace resident said yesterday. "It’s more than I pay for school and books, and I don’t have a lot of money left for food."
Since August, Hunter has amassed more than $1,800 in charges from Videotron Ltd. because an unauthorized user hacked into her password-protected wireless network. Despite her insistence she couldn’t have used what amounted to hundreds of gigabytes of data, on calls to Videotron’s customer service, each representative insisted she was responsible for usage stemming from her account. She has paid more than $1,300 since the summer and still owes the company $506.
A political science student at Concordia, Hunter said she needs Internet service for her studies, so she continues to pay the bills for fear her service will be disconnected.
For a year, Hunter and her roommate were told their usage had exceeded the limit of 30 gigabytes every month and were billed a $50 fee for exceeding the limit.
Hunter said she and her roommate called the company monthly to get an explanation of the charges, and took customer service representatives at their word that they had gone over her limit. When her roommate moved out in July, Hunter upgraded to an Internet package with a download limit of 100 gigabytes but wasn’t told there would no longer be a maximum charge.
That’s when her bills started to climb.
"I watch a lot of television shows, so I thought that took up a lot of data," Hunter said. "I didn’t really know what a gigabyte was until my boyfriend looked at my account and told me there was no way I could have been using that much data."
In one month, Hunter’s account was billed for 350 gigabytes of data, which amounts to downloading about 80 full-length high-definition movies in one month.
Hunter, who doesn’t download movies, feels Videotron should have noticed her usage was out of the ordinary for a residential customer.
She said only one customer service representative said he thought her wireless network had been hacked, but the line disconnected during the call, and Hunter was told there was no record of the conversation in Videotron’s logs.
Speaking for Videotron, Isabelle Dessureault said the company took responsibility by reversing some of its charges, but when a customer repeatedly racks up such high download limits, it becomes her responsibility.
"It’s a case where Videotron showed some understanding and listened to what happened," she said. "We’re well-renowned in the industry for our technical support team. We credited her account for $313, but at a certain point, we need to share the responsibility. We don’t like these kind of situations."
She added that Hunter was referred to Linksys, the company she bought her wireless router from, to take steps to make her wireless network more secure.
However, Hunter said that she received that phone number only when she called customer service in December to ask for it. "After they credited me, I basically stopped watching TV on my computer, and cut everything down to bare minimum, and then the next month I had an even bigger charge. That’s when I realized there was a big problem."
She said her wireless password was an intricate mix of numbers and letters, which no hacker would be able to guess, but she finally disconnected her wireless network in December and now uses an extra-long cable in her apartment. Her usage appears to have been brought down to normal levels.
It’s not uncommon for people to rack up huge Internet bills without realizing it, said Dan Rudich, the CEO of Montreal-based Anomalous Networks, which offers free applications to warn mobile phone and computer users that they are close to exceeding their data limits.
Videotron has tools for users to monitor their usage but doesn’t advise customers when they have exceeded their limits. Company spokesperson Elodie Girardin-Lajoie said a warning system is in the works where customers would be emailed when they approached their limits, and that it should be in place by the end of the year.
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