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It was “a move that could bring in more than a half-billion dollars in annual revenue to the telecom giant,”The Wall Street Journal reported. (Other phone companies charge similar administrative fees.)

Bowers has two obvious options. She can file a complaint with the Texas attorney general’s office, which examines claims of deceptive advertising. She can also file a small-claims court lawsuit against AT&T for $300 to cover her lost money for a year and other added expenses. She doesn’t need a lawyer for small claims. But she needs proof of the deception, preferably in writing, photos or recordings.

How sad that Bowers’ longtime affection for her former company has come to this. She speaks nostalgically of “the universal relationship” the phone company once had with its customers.

“They frittered it away,” she says.

Are you tired of fighting the bank, the credit card company, the electric company and the phone company? They can be worse than scammers the way they treat customers. A popular book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong, shows you how to fight back — and win! The book is available at WatchdogNation.com as a hardcover, CD audio book, e-book and hey, what else do you need? The author is The Watchdog columnist for The Dallas Morning News. Visit our store. Now revised and expanded, the book won two national book awards for social change. Twitter @DaveLieber

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Filed Under: Bad Business, Column, Customer Service Issues, Technology Issues, Utilities Tagged With: Ampersand Diaries, AT&T overcharge, Dallas Morning News, DallasNews.com, Dave Lieber, John Spiller, Marina Trahan Martinez, watchdog nation

The Watchdog: Is this the worst electricity company in Texas?

January 1, 2014 by Dave Lieber

The worst electricity company in Texas.

That’s what state regulators are calling Proton Energy of Fort Worth. They say Proton, which serves homes and businesses, botched almost everything that an electric company must do.

The Public Utility Commission of Texas wants to shut down Proton — the second time it has tried to close the 4-year-old company. The PUC also wants to fine the company $2 million. PUC investigators say they can prove that Proton committed at least a thousand violations. That’s a lot of mistakes, even for an electric company.

Proton’s lawyer says that the company is correcting mistakes and that state regulators are too aggressive.

It’s no secret that in the decade since electricity was deregulated in Texas, there have been good companies and bad companies. But Proton may be in a class by itself. For one thing, the address for its corporate headquarters, state records show, is a Shell gasoline station at the corner of Jacksboro Highway and North University Drive. Station owner Ramzan R. Ali is also president of Proton, which by my estimate has more than a thousand customers spread from North Texas to Houston.

Customer service calls are handled elsewhere, but one commenter on TexasElectricityRatings.com writes, “They are unfriendly over the phone. They are unprofessional. Every time I call, it seems like they are running this so-called operation from an apartment.”

As readers of The Dallas Morning News Dave Lieber Watchdog column first learned, Ali runs a company that if not deceptive in its marketing is confusing. An electricity shopper on the Internet who arrives at Proton’s website sees what is probably the lowest variable rate offered anywhere in the state — 5.8 cents a kilowatt-hour. But check the fine print details on the Electricity Facts Label, and the true cost could be as much as a nickel higher.

There’s no Electricity Facts Label on the website, as required, for the company’s second option, its three-month fixed-rate plan. And embarrassingly, on the website’s home page, the universal abbreviation for kilowatt-hour — kWh — is wrongly displayed as kwH.

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Here’s the PUC’s case against the company. At least 407 times, the PUC charges, Proton disconnected customers for nonpayment of their bills without giving them proper notice. Twenty-nine of those disconnects came during extreme weather (too hot, too cold), making them doubly illegal.

Proton officials prevented at least 288 customers from obtaining electricity elsewhere after they left Proton by inaccurately listing them as switch-holds. In a switch-hold, a customer owes money to a company and can’t switch to another company until the debt is paid and the hold is lifted. The PUC says the customers didn’t owe Proton money, but the average time people were wrongly kept on switch-holds was 317 days anyway.

When asked about this, Proton provided the PUC with false and misleading information, the PUC states in its petition to revoke the company’s license.

Proton charged 200 customers sign-up fees ranging from $75 to $100, illegal in Texas. The PUC said Proton ignored PUC inquiries on some customer complaints, failed to file a required semiannual report, didn’t translate its marketing materials into Spanish, didn’t make its terms of service available on its website, failed to provide a toll-free number and didn’t include a way for new customers to leave their names and addresses on its website.

There’s more, according to the PUC. Proton listed the termination fee for its variable month-to-month plan at $1,000. There’s usually no termination fee for that.

The company kept billing customers even when they had moved to another electric company, sent multiple bills to the same customer in a single month and charged a $2 fee for those who sent their monthly payments via the U.S. mail.

Proton’s bills sometimes left off dates, dollar amounts owed and meter readings. In a written complaint, one customer told the PUC, “The bill is just a hand-typed email with very little information on the energy I used.”

Proton’s monthly bills failed to inform customers about the state-run shopping site for electricity customers — PowerToChoose.org. No surprise there. Proton, unlike most Texas companies, doesn’t participate on the heavily trafficked site.

Ali, the owner, referred my questions to the company’s hired attorney, Bob Rima, who previously worked as the PUC’s general counsel.

Rima said he couldn’t answer specifics because the PUC’s charges do not include actual cases but generalities.

“Proton is not perfect,” he said. “Its inadvertent mistakes are no different than the mistakes made by” others. “Proton has diligently tried to correct all mistakes.”

The lawyer called the PUC’s action “an aggressive and inflammatory stance.” He said that in a future hearing, which he will seek, he doesn’t believe his former colleagues at the PUC can meet the required burden of proof on the more serious charges.

Two years ago, Ali paid a $10,000 fine to the PUC for failing to provide sufficient information about the company’s finances and its technical and managerial qualifications.

Ali’s latest problems were first reported by R.A. Dyer, a policy analyst for the Texas Coalition for Affordable Power, on that group’s website. Ali released a written statement to Dyer, according to the website, stating that Proton tries to treat customers fairly. However, a small minority of its customers behave like thieves, Ali wrote, “so my job is to make sure good customers should not suffer.”

Dyer tells The Watchdog, “If these allegations are true, this company is a serial rules violator and should be barred from operating in Texas.”

PUC complaint records show some customers agree.

“They are difficult to work with, are not helpful and have not told the truth,” one writes.

“It seems like they will tell me and others whatever they want and change their story to get you off the phone and not help resolve any issue,” another writes to the PUC. “How can you allow Proton … to take our money, then … [cheat] us the consumer, and allow them to stay in business?”

Staff writer Marina Trahan Martinez contributed to this report.

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Filed Under: Bad Business, Column, Utilities Tagged With: Dallas Morning News, DallasNews.com, Dave Lieber, Marina Trahan Martinez, Proton Energy, Ramzan R. Ali, Texas PUC, watchdog nation, worst electricity company

The Watchdog: In the world of Texas electricity, free is not always free

December 9, 2013 by Dave Lieber

TXU Free Weekends promises free electricity for 48 hours beginning at midnight Friday. But during the week, expect to pay 19 cents per kwh. Holy moly! It’s free, The Watchdog says, but it’s expensive when it’s not.

Can a company say something is free when it’s not? Can a company put the word free in the title of a product even when customers have to pay?

Or worse, can a company selling this product with the word free in the title actually charge the highest rates around?

As readers of The Dallas Morning News Dave Lieber Watchdog column first learned, that’s what’s happening now, according to some critics, with revolutionary new plans for free electricity on nights or weekends offered by TXU Energy and competitor Reliant Energy.

Some people tell The Watchdog they’re confused.

Check this out: TXU Free Nights promises free electricity every day from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. But what about the rest of the time? A residential customer gets slammed with an outrageous 18 cents per kilowatt-hour rate, about double what anybody else would pay on a normal price plan offered by most companies.

TXU Free Weekends promises free electricity for 48 hours beginning at midnight Friday. But during the week, expect to pay 19 cents per kwh. Holy moly! It’s free, but it’s expensive when it’s not.

Both plans are 18-month contracts with whopping early cancellation fees of $295 that aren’t even prorated. The only good thing — and this is important — is that TXU gives you 60 days to bail out of these programs without a cancellation charge if you’re not happy.

Reliant’s Free Weekends plan tacks on an extra four hours on Friday night, starting at 8 p.m., but the cost is almost 15 cents per kwh the rest of the time plus an extra $6.48 a month, which is part of Oncor’s delivery charge.

A difference is that TXU says it waives the Oncor charge during free hours, but Reliant doesn’t, meaning electricity used during free time is not entirely free. Reliant also gives its customers a free Nest Learning Thermostat, a $249 value.

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With 1.5 million customers and more than 40 percent of the market share, TXU deserves credit for not running in place and shaking up its offerings. Let’s detour for a moment and give TXU even bigger credit for its remarkable turnaround in customer service in the last year or so.

Four years ago, state regulators received more than 4,000 complaints from Texans about their electricity company. Asia-based customer service centers frustrated customers, as did an antiquated billing system left over from when TXU’s legacy company was the region’s utility monopoly. Many customers jumped to one of TXU’s 50 or so competitors.

Every year since, TXU has cut its complaint numbers in half. This year, TXU has fewer than 400 complaints before the state Public Utility Commission. That’s a truly remarkable turnaround.

Sadly, or maybe not, this comes at the same time TXU’s parent company, Dallas-based Energy Future Holdings, could be weeks away from filing what would be — with more than $40 billion in debt — one of the largest bankruptcies for a company not in the financial industry.

In the midst of this, TXU brags that almost 100,000 customers — 1 in 15 — have signed up for a “free” electricity program.

Dick Bunting of Bonham tells me he studied the plans and says “this makes my blood boil.” The title sounds good, he says, “but looking into it, you will find it is one of the worst deals out there in electric provider land.” He fears trusting seniors will sign up for the plan not knowing what they’re getting into.

TXU spokesman Michael Patterson says company reps are trained to ask a lot of questions before allowing customers to sign up for a program. “We want people to really understand and be happy with their selection,” he says.

One TXU competitor, Entrust Energy of Houston, created a truth-in-advertising campaign to show that the Entrust rates would save customers a thousand dollars or more in comparison to the free plans.

Entrust spokesman Kevin West said, “It’s interesting that TXU is pitching that this is so ‘free’ when in reality customers on these plans will pay a lot more in the non-free period.”

(Note that the PUC announced last week that Entrust agreed to pay $60,000 to settle an investigation into alleged violations of consumer protection rules.)

An analysis by the Texas Coalition for Affordable Power, which pushes for transparency in electricity pricing on behalf of member cities, also questions the plans, calling them “gimmick electric deals.”

“Let’s take free nights,” coalition analyst R.A. Dyer says. “If you work at night and sleep during the day, you’re still going to have to run your air conditioner during the day.”

He continues, “The main webpage of TXU’s pricing page doesn’t mention the 18-cent price for daytime hours. You have to go to the Energy Facts Label to find that.

“Also, these are 18-month, fixed-rate deals with a $295 early cancellation fee. Once you’ve figured out you can’t live the vampire lifestyle forever, or you figure out that the [kwh] rate is too high, you can’t walk away from this deal without paying a pretty hefty cancellation fee.”

TXU’s Patterson doesn’t agree that information is withheld from consumers. That’s not the way the new, improved TXU operates, he says.

“We always want to be the ones that are trustworthy and transparent in our pricing. We don’t hike fees. We’re straightforward, and we’re competitively priced.”

Bottom line: Texas retail electricity pricing is needlessly confusing. Every company has its own way of presenting its prices so numbers can’t easily be compared. Early cancellation fees are outrageous. Marketing is sometimes confusing, if not downright misleading. The fine print is everything.

And free? In the world of Texas electricity? Come on.

Follow Dave Lieber on Twitter at @Dave Lieber.

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Filed Under: Column, Customer Service Issues, Utilities Tagged With: Dallas Morning News, Dave Lieber, Entrust Energy, free electricity, free nights, free weekends, Reliant Energy, TXU Energy, watchdog column, watchdog nation

WORLD EXCLUSIVE: AT&T will take $14 off your phone bill, but there’s a catch

January 31, 2013 by Dave Lieber

Here’s big news that could save you $168 a year on your phone bill. But of course, AT&T isn’t calling to tell you.

Watchdog Nation is.

You may be entitled to a $14 reduction on your monthly phone bill – plus another three months of back credit for another $42. Over a year, that’s $168.

But there’s a catch. Only Watchdog Nation, the consumer rights movement led by founder Dave Lieber, an investigative columnist, can tell you how to do this. In four words.

You. Have. To. Ask.

Here’s the deal. One of the many free-and-easy guiding principles of Dave’s Watchdog Nation is this: you have to remember to ask each of your providers (cable, satellite TV, Internet, phone, electric) every few months if they are running any specials that will lower your bill. Tell them their competitors are offering you better prices.

Almost every time we do it, it works.

The other day, we, at Watchdog Nation World Headquarters in Texas, called AT&T’s customer service line. It’s no secret that Watchdog Nation is no fan of this corporate beast. (See our post “Is AT&T America’s worst company?”).

What we learned in that call surprised us. Turns out that for the past few months, AT&T has offered a new discount program that it has not publicized. Remember: You. Have. To. Ask. [pullquote]It’s called the “All Distance Bundle Package.”[/pullquote]

It’s called the “All Distance Bundle Package.”

This is available to all AT&T customers who meet the requirements: aAnyone who has the “premium unlimited long distance and local calling plan” with AT&T and WHO ALSO pays for another AT&T service using the same name and Social Security number, can get the $14 monthly discount.

Other services that qualify include: any U-verse product; any DSL Internet product (all speeds qualify); any wireless plan rated at $39.99 per month or higher, or anyone who subscribes to DirecTV.

In other words, if you use AT&T, say, for your home landline and also have U-verse TV or DirecTV, you get $14 off your bill.

But …

You. Have. To. Ask.

Remember the name: The All Distance Bundle Package.

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Do you like this kind of up-to-date inside information? Learning how to save money, avoid scams and be smart about how you spend your dollar?

You’ll love the new 2013 edition of the national award-winning book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong. Learn more at Dave’s bookstore here.

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Filed Under: Announcements, Column, Customer Service Issues, Technology Issues, Utilities Tagged With: AT&T, AT&T bill, cell phone bill, discount phone, lower phone bill, phone bill

How to beat a Texas electric company when your variable rate goes up too much

September 14, 2011 by Dave Lieber

Attention Texas electricity customers with variable rates: If you expect to get walloped when the next bill arrives, Watchdog Nation has a strategy that may get that bill lowered.

As first reported in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Dave Lieber Watchdog column, at the August 2011 meeting of the Texas Public Utility Commission, new Chairwoman Donna L. Nelson held a copy of this previous Watchdog Nation report on Dynowatt and spoke about the Arlington man whose power bill jumped to $1,111 in one month because of electricity rate spikes.

“I’m sure you saw the article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram this morning about the gentleman who was with Dynowatt, and it was a variable rate plan,” she said. His rate jumped from 10.6 to 18.3 cents per kilowatt-hour, she explained.

(In the above photo, Texas PUC Chairwoman Donna L. Nelson holds up a Watchdog Nation report from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and asks the enforcement division to look into it.)

“Under the new rules we adopted there were certain disclosures that had to take place on the bill, if you remember. And so this article calls into question whether those actually happened.

“I guess I would like enforcement staff to look into this and make sure that the disclosures that are supposed to be happening are happening.”

There it is! The key to getting a power bill lowered. It’s like that moment in school when the teacher tells students what will be on the test.

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This is a test that some Texas electricity companies will flunk. They may be confused about state requirements detailing how variable rate increases must be disclosed to customers on their bills. That confusion and a failure to comply works to customers’ advantage.

The Texas Retail Electric Scorecard, a widely circulated industry newsletter, reported Nelson’s remarks and outlined for electric companies a summary of the rules. But probably not in time for August bills to be corrected.

For example, certain sentences must appear in 12-point type on a bill. (That didn’t happen on the Dynowatt bill.) Here’s a sample: “Please review the historical price of this product available at (insert specific website address and toll-free telephone number).”

If a customer gets a bill with a price spike but without that sentence about the company website and telephone number, he or she should submit a copy of that bill to the PUC as part of a formal complaint. Regulators will check whether the company followed the rules. If not, the bill will be lowered.

See other requirements in the state rules at tinyurl.com/3gsvwvg.

The Amigo Energy example

Here’s what can happen to a company that doesn’t follow the rules.

In 2008, I interviewed then-Amigo Energy founder and CEO Javier Vega about why his company didn’t include rate information on the company’s “facts label” as required. I showed him that state rules weren’t followed when Amigo raised its rate from 16 to 24 cents for a Fort Worth customer.

He answered, “I’m going to scream for a second.” He put me on hold, consulted his staff, returned and said: “I apologize. We’ve been better at this.”

After that, Fulcrum Energy, the company that bought Vega out, reneged on its agreement to keep Vega as an officer in the company. Vega sued for wrongful termination. The trial was held in Houston in July.

Vega says that his 2008 comments to me were one of two reasons cited for his firing.

On Aug. 1, a Houston jury awarded Vega a judgment that, with lawyer fees, could reach $3 million.

Last week, Amigo/Fulcrum was sold to Just Energy, a Texas electricity provider based in Toronto.

Vega’s lawsuit illustrates what can happen behind the scenes at a Texas electric company when operators don’t buy enough electricity before a power spike. That can cause bills for variable-rate customers to jump.

According to Vega’s lawsuit, Fulcrum insisted on a get-tough strategy aimed at customers who owed the company money, even if the charges were incorrect. Vega alleged that Fulcrum co-founder Gerardo Manalac ordered collection letters sent to customers only days after the first bills arrived. He also refused a PUC directive that Amigo rerate the bills.

Manalac previously denied those allegations in an interview.

Eventually, the PUC cited Amigo for numerous violations: not sending bills, refusing to offer payment arrangements to shell-shocked customers, not giving proper notice before an increase and not responding to complaints.

Amigo/Fulcrum paid a $15,000 state fine. Now comes this jury verdict.

The message is clear. An electricity company that raises a variable rate has to follow the rules. It’s up to customers to make sure this happens.

# # #

Are you tired of fighting the bank, the credit card company, the electric company and the phone company? They can be worse than scammers the way they treat customers. A popular book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong, shows you how to fight back — and win! The book is available at WatchdogNation.com as a hardcover, CD audio book, e-book and hey, what else do you need? The author is The Watchdog columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Visit our store. Now revised and expanded, the book won two national book awards for social change. Twitter @DaveLieber.