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News flash: telcos will take advantage of you

If you’re dumb enough to sign on the bottom line without doing a little due diligence, you deserve what you get. In this case, a fellow thinks Sprint owes him a refund because he agreed to a deal with them.

Boo freaking hoo. A guy in a bind takes the terms he’s offered, and lo and behold those terms turn out to be a lot more favorable to the seller than to the customer. Cue the world’s smallest violin and see what GigaOm had to say about it:

As detailed by Allen Harkleroad (who is one wrathful Southerner) on his web site, Sprint has been charging him almost four times the price of the amount it pays the local telephone company for two T-1 access lines. That’s about a 75 percent gross margin. But what really drove Harkleroad around the bend was being lied to by a Sprint salesman, who claimed that the company was charged $1,998 for the T-1s (the phone company, on the other hand, said it charges some $500). Harkleroad has since switched providers and pays about $1,500 less per month.

But he’s not done with Sprint yet. He figures the company owes him about $56,000 (for charging him so much), and he wants to get paid.

Harkleroad says on his cheekily named website how his company is so trusting and never dreamed a big firm would hose a smaller firm this way. Commenters at GigaOm chastised him for not doing due diligence before signing the deal, or even during the 3 years and 4 months he had the service for his business.

Good luck on getting that $56k. Any competent judge ought to laugh that claim out of court if it ever makes it onto a docket.


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