Monday, December 17, 2012

Secret email shows FedEx gouged customers for years

Some will rob you with a six-gun,
some with a fountain pen. 
Don't know how we missed this, but Bloomberg News reported last week that internal emails show FedEx systematically overcharged its customers.

The email came to light in a class-action suit against FedEx. The lawsuit alleges FedEx Corp. and FedEx Corporate Services Inc. overcharged business and government customers as much as $3 per package for millions of packages.

Bloomberg reports,
The plaintiffs, who claim violations of federal civil racketeering laws, seek three times the amount of the alleged overcharges in their lawsuit. 
“We allege that FedEx has and continues to engage in a pattern of intentionally charging its customers residential delivery fees for deliveries to obviously non-residential addresses such as courthouses, government offices and banks,” Steven J. Rosenwasser, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in an interview.
The emails are from an employee named Alan Elam. They were unsealed last week as part of the legal proceedings. Bloomberg reports the emails say:
"It became clear to me at this time that we had a systemic problem that was likely causing overcharges for thousands of our customers, and that the dollar value was huge,” Elam wrote in an Aug. 12, 2011, e-mail to Daniel Mullally, FedEx senior vice president for sales. 
Elam said he brought the issue to the attention of three of his superiors, including his managing director. “In conversations with each, I used the language, ‘This is a huge class-action lawsuit waiting to happen.’ None of them have ever reported back taking any action to elevate this issue,” Elam wrote. 
“FedEx has been systematically overcharging our customers for services that we know we did not provide, and we have been doing so for many years,” Elam said.
To give you an idea of how much money $3 per package might involve, Atlantic Wire points out that FedEx delivers 19 million packages a day.