Over 294 Vermont businesses will benefit from a $200,000 settlement with a Texas company announced today by Vermont Attorney General William H Sorrell. The State of Vermont sued Enhanced Services Billing, Inc (ESBI) in May, alleging that the company violated a state law designed to protect Vermonters from unauthorized charges on their landline telephone bills (a practice known as “cramming”), and facilitated cramming by a seller of Web services called Localbizusa. The Stipulation and Consent Order requires ESBI, a “billing aggregator” based in San Antonio, Texas, to pay $75,000 in refunds to the businesses and $125,000 to the State.
In May 2014, the Attorney General’s Office sued ESBI and Localbizusa’s former president and owner, Pat Giglio of Piscataway, New Jersey (the latter company having previously gone out of business). According to the court complaint, Localbizusa signed up Vermont businesses for web services without their permission, used a deceptive telemarketing script to do so, and failed to provide legally-required billing and cancellation disclosures. The complaint also alleged that ESBI, which arranged for the charges to be placed on the local telephone bills, failed, as required by law, to ensure that businesses were alerted in writing that they would be charged on their phone bills, and facilitated the Localbizusa charges.
ESBI will be sending refund checks directly to the affected Vermont businesses; any checks that cannot be paid will be turned over to the State’s unclaimed property fund. Attorney General Sorrell noted that the settlement is “the most recent development in an initiative launched several years ago to end landline cramming in Vermont, which has led to refunds to Vermonters of over $2.5 million and passage by the Vermont Legislature of the strictest anti-cramming law in the United States.”
Source: Attorney General 8.4.2014