AT&T customers could receive a check or credit after the wireless company settled a Federal Trade Commission complaint with a $60 million fund to reimburse customers who had their data “throttled” by the company, the FTC announced Wednesday.
The fund will settle an FTC complaint from 2014 that claimed the company misled customers by advertising unlimited data plans, but then “throttled” data speed or drastically slowed it down if customers used more than a certain amount during a billing period.
The FTC said the company began throttling data speeds in 2011, and that by 2014, more than 3.5 million customers had been affected. According to the complaint, data speeds were slowed up to 95 percent, making many applications like GPS navigation, web browsing and video streaming “practically inoperable.”
The FTC called AT&T’s actions a “bait-and-switch scam.”
