Verizon, T-Mobile Discounts Are Being Used to Get Access to Your Bank Account
In recent days, various mobile phone service providers have been offering their customers discounts.
But, as the old adage goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Every one of these companies wants something very specific in return for these reduced prices: access to your bank account.
According to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, companies such as Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T are all offering deals meant to persuade customers to link a debit card or bank account, rather than their credit cards, to their accounts.
Recently, Verizon has been offering $40 discounts on four-line plans, T-Mobile said it would actually remove discounts if users didn’t switch over to direct bank account payments, and AT&T announced any customer that didn’t switch over their payments would lose discounts as well.
The Journal reported that many of its own employees had actually been receiving these sorts of notifications from their own mobile phone providers.
So, why do these companies want access to your bank account?
In order to cut out the middlemen, namely credit-card companies such as Visa and Mastercard.
According to the Journal, both companies have raised the price of transaction fees over the last few years.
“[Service providers] are looking for ways to avoid them by getting payments straight from bank accounts,” the Journal reported.
Customers pay promptly and are less likely to switch providers.”
Most Americans, as many as 85 percent, will be comfortable with the change.
But perhaps they shouldn’t be.
T-Mobile has made headlines time and time again over its company’s data breaches. Hackers stole the data of a whopping 37 million customers in January, per the Journal.
Although credit card numbers, Social Security numbers and other sensitive data remained safe during the leak, the hackers did manage to obtain billing addresses, names, emails, birth dates and account numbers.
If you give your banking information to a company such as this, who’s to say that hackers such as these won’t have access to your bank account next time something like this happens?
For the 15 percent of Americans who don’t feel comfortable with direct payments, a few fees here and there will likely be a small price to pay.
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