Paul Allen is a Crook

Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen and his cable company, Charter Communications, have stolen nearly 500 dollars from me and seem to have no intention of repaying it.

This should come as no surprise: the company is known to employ criminals, such as former Senior VP David McCall, who in 2003 pled guilty to wire fraud in a scheme to defraud Charter's stockholders. Interestingly, part of this scheme, the purpose of which was to cook the books and inflate subscriber counts, consisted of delaying customer disconnections until after the end of a fiscal quarter.

As far as I know, Charter's plan was to defraud investors by pumping up their stock, not to charge people for service they hadn't ordered. But the criminals at Charter Communications have gotten smarter. If you defraud the stockholders, you might have to deal with the Securities and Exchange Commission and go to jail. If you steal from customers, you're untouchable. The Better Business Bureau doesn't exactly have the same teeth as the SEC.

Judging by my experience, their crooked practices still involve failing to disconnect service, but now they just keep on billing the customers. Then they hide behind an army of incompetent customer service representatives in multiple call centers all over the country. Each time a customer calls to complain about being billed he has to wait 20 to 30 minutes on hold. Call volumes are always "unusual" at Charter, the Lake Wobegon of customer service.

Since there's no way to talk to the same rep twice, the customer has to spend another 20 to 30 minutes getting the new rep up to speed on the situation. At that point the rep gives him a completely different story than the last rep. If the customer asks about the story he got the last time the new rep will have no idea why he was told that, nor feel the slightest obligation to live up to any promises made. There may be the vague suggestion that the customer imagined them.

The service rep is therefore free to say anything. The check's in the mail. Your credit card will be credited. It certainly won't be true and it doesn't even need to be credible. If the customer gets mad that people are lying to his face he can simply be disconnected.

Most importantly, there is no way for the customer to break out of the system. He will never learn the full name of any Charter employee, nor would he have any way of contacting them if he did. No matter how much he pleads, or how extreme his situation, he must never, ever be given anything but the standard 800 number he started out with.

If the customer pays by check, the fraudulent bills are merely a maddening waste of a huge amount of time (at least until they are referred to a collection agency and the customer's credit is destroyed). But if Charter has the customer's credit card number, they're in the money!