If your phone line gets hacked, guess who your service provider thinks should pay the bill

Arlene Howard’s phone bill said she made a bunch of calls to Cuba, which she didn’t. Her service provider, Charter Communications, acknowledged that her office line must have been hacked. But it still demanded that she pay thousands of dollars to cover the cost of the bogus calls. To which all customers of Charter’s Spectrum service should rightly respond: Say what?! You probably didn’t know this — I didn’t — but buried deep within the fine print of Spectrum’s terms of service for business and residential landlines is a provision that the customer, not the company, is responsible for any fraudulent use of the phone service. I found similar provisions tucked away in AT&T’s and Frontier Communications’ terms. You get hacked, you pay.