{"id":8713,"date":"2012-01-03T07:00:01","date_gmt":"2012-01-03T07:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2012\/01\/03\/the-new-business-model-intentional-billing-errors\/"},"modified":"2012-01-03T07:00:01","modified_gmt":"2012-01-03T07:00:01","slug":"the-new-business-model-intentional-billing-errors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20120103-01\/?p=8713","title":{"rendered":"The new business model: Intentional billing errors"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just in the last month, I had to call a bank to reverse four erroneous &#8220;Account Maintenance Fees&#8221; across two different accounts. It appears that <a href=\"http:\/\/dilbert.com\/strips\/comic\/2011-05-04\/\"> intentional billing errors<\/a> is the new business model for our struggling economy. (For the record, although I am responsible for maintaining these accounts, I did not open the accounts at the bank in question. My personal account is at a credit union.)\n One of my friends remarked, &#8220;I got only two. They must not really be trying yet.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p> Many years ago, back when the dot-com bubble appeared unpoppable, a different friend of mine happened to meet somebody who sheepishly admitted that one of his previous jobs was at a what-we-can-euphemistically-call &#8220;adult online entertainment&#8221; site, where he was responsible for developing algorithms to determine which customers could safely be double- or even triple-billed. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just in the last month, I had to call a bank to reverse four erroneous &#8220;Account Maintenance Fees&#8221; across two different accounts. It appears that intentional billing errors is the new business model for our struggling economy. (For the record, although I am responsible for maintaining these accounts, I did not open the accounts at [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[132,103],"class_list":["post-8713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-exploiting-the-inattentive","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Just in the last month, I had to call a bank to reverse four erroneous &#8220;Account Maintenance Fees&#8221; across two different accounts. It appears that intentional billing errors is the new business model for our struggling economy. (For the record, although I am responsible for maintaining these accounts, I did not open the accounts at [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}