Developmentally Disabled Man Hit With Cell Phone Fees

If you have a cell phone, chances are you've agreed to an early termination fee if you cancel your service before the end of your contract. But ETFs are a hotly debated issue.

The FCC and federal lawmakers are reviewing the practice, and nearly every major cell phone carrier has paid millions of dollars to settle ETF-related lawsuits.

Still, when a Seattle family claims it had a valid excuse to get out of a cell contract, yet was charged hundreds of dollars in early termination fees, they called KIRO 7 Consumer Investigator Amy Clancy for help.

David Parisi is a 50-year-old developmentally disabled man who lives in a group home and has a regular job washing dishes at a downtown Seattle restaurant. His sister Carolyn Parisi says David doesn't spend a lot of time on the phone.

"I know that when he lived at home and everything, we would help him make a phone call; actually dial the numbers for him” Carolyn Parisi told Clancy. “You need help with dialing, right?” she asked her brother. “Right,” David Parisi agreed.

Yet while shopping in downtown Seattle one day, Parisi bought a cell phone and signed a T-Mobile service contract.

David Parisi tells Clancy he was just looking when he was approached by a salesman.

“Well, someone offered me a cell phone and I said, I didn’t have enough. I’m not interested, and that’s what I said.”

Clancy asked him, “And how much did you think the bill was going to be?”

“How much? Thirty,forty-thousand-hundred. And I said, 'that’s too much,'" said David Parisi.

Yet Parisi signed the service contract and went home with a phone he never even used. His sister says neither she nor Parisi's caregiver even knew he had a phone until he started receiving bills he didn't pay.

Parisi returned the phone, but was charged a $200 early termination fee, per the T-Mobile contract. Hoping to fight the ETF, Carolyn Parisi called T-Mobile customer service.

"I explained to him that he is mentally challenged and shouldn’t have a cell phone, and they sympathized with me. But then they sent me, they told me to call the collections agency, and that it had already gone to collections.”

Bellevue-based T-Mobile, which would not agree to an on-camera interview, claims it couldn't do anything about the bill or the collections attempt because Carolyn Parisi didn't have "power of attorney" for her brother. But Carolyn Parisi did send both T-Mobile and the New York-based collections agency copies of letters from her brother's health care providers, the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, and others, explaining that David Parisi is developmentally disabled.

In the words of a health care provider at the University of Washington, Parisi, "is not competent to enter into a contract of any sort."

Carolyn Parisi claims, "I thought that would be enough information for them to check it out to make sure that, you know, we weren’t making it up or something.”

Carolyn Parisi says the collections agency did agree to reduce the ETF fee to just over $100. Frustrated, she called KIRO 7 Consumer Investigators.

Clancy called T-Mobile, which "agreed to close the account with a zero balance and notify the collection agency."

But the Parisis claim they should have been able to get the same results on their own. "I just don’t think it’s right that no one would listen and do anything about it,” Carolyn Parisi told Clancy.

University of Washington Law Professor and Director of Disability Studies, Paul Miller, agrees.

"Based upon these letters, given Mr. Parisi’s developmental disability, his mental retardation, there’s evidence that he did not understand the contract, did not live in a situation in which he could be able to pay that contract coming in, and thus shouldn’t be bound by that contract,” Miller told Clancy. “T-Mobile should have said, 'our mistake, this really wasn’t a valid contract to begin with, let’s forget the whole thing and go our separate ways,'" Miller maintains.

Clancy asked David Parisi how this whole situation made him feel. “Not very good,” he answered.

The Parisis don’t blame the salesman who sold the phone because they claim it’s not his job to determine who can buy a cell phone and who can’t.

Professor Miller agrees.

If you’d like to read T-Mobile’s entire statement regarding the Parisi case, click here.

And if you’d like to learn more about the ETF bill proposed in Congress, click here.

General Consumer Tip Related to This Incident: If someone other than the primary account holder may need to request changes made to the account, that person must be listed on the account. This is something important for parents to remember, or for adults to remember, if their elderly parents have a phone.