I stopped at a gas station halfway between San Diego and El Centro to place a call to my fiance and let him know that I had met with a handful of delays in my departure to visit him, and that I was alive and well - he had expected me to arrive in the afternoon, and it was at this point well into the evening, and my cellphone had been destroyed by a friend's puppy, so I had no other means of getting ahold of him. I used my debit card to pay for the call, expecting that the charge would probably be a bit high, but tolerable. My fiance didn't pick up, and I left a voicemail. The full length of the call was approximately 5 minutes.
After arriving at my fiance's house, and upon checking my account history, I saw a charge of $20.00 from a business called Custom Teleconnect, located in Las Vegas, NV. I did some digging online and found their website (which is catered towards businesses looking to install payphones and pay for their connection services), a listing of their fee schedules (again, designed for the businesses looking for their services), and at least one filed complaint against them by a general consumer for the exact same thing.
I will take this up with my bank immediately, and have them dispute the charge. I can see paying up to $5.00 for the service to connect me - the gas station was in the middle of nowhere, and my fiance's # carries an out-of-state area code - but $20? I don't even have a word for how insane that is. Ridiculous, ludicrous, obscene, outrageous, unheard-of, outlandish, jaw-dropping, and criminal also seem not quite enough to describe this charge.
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