Thomson, a vacation packager that serves some seven million customers a year in Britain, has admitted that it keeps a blacklist of customers who complain too much. If those grumblers try to book another vacation, they'll be unceremoniously denied. "They'll be told that we are unable to meet their expectations," a company rep told the U.K. Times.

"There's always been a philosophy that the customer is right," said the Thomson rep. "But these people will never be happy."

Some people don't stop at sending back soup when it's too cold or asking building maintenance to change light bulbs. There's the crew that trashes rooms and endangers others, and there's also a whole underworld of pikers who make a game out of picking fights in an apparent effort to pressure businesses into free upgrades or refunds. They dabble in outright fraud, ripping out wiring before marching to the lobby to complain about dangerous exposed wires. And as times get tougher and budgets stretch tighter, the something-for-nothing trickery is bound to get worse.

According to one service industry professional, the web has made it easier to target businesses with demands. Once a few complainers successfully extract refunds from a hotel, word gets out, and soon the career grifters swoop in for easy pickings. When a new hotel opens, for example, the white-gloved harpies get wind of it and arrive to find fault with minor issues such as faulty lighting and pool heaters that don't work properly yet.

It happens all the time. One Comcast customer was dumped for using too much web service on a plan he purchased because it was "unlimited." The company told him the word referred to the fact he could be on his computer as much as he wanted, not that he could view as many pages and videos as he wanted. And then Comcast tried selling him a more expensive plan. Infuriated, he fought back, launching a fiery blog and a cutting YouTube protest to tell the world he'd been ripped off. And a consumer advocate was born.

In July, Sprint put a cap on its previously "unlimited" data card usage, following Verizon and AT&T. Now, 5 gigabytes is all you get unless you want corporate monkeys to shut off your supply. Americans aren't the only ones to suffer the bait-and-switch defended by dense legalese and bent logic in the Terms of Service contract: U.K.'s Vodafone puts similar caps on its "unlimited" mobile phone plan, as does Canada's TELUS.

Count on it each election season: Our elected representatives finally get off their duffs and start working on things that will actually affect our pocketbooks.

Early this week, Sen. Herb Kohl, who chairs the Antitrust Subcommittee in the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to the big four cell phone providers to demand they account for their outlandish recent price increases on text messages. Since 2005, the price of a text message has doubled to an industry standard of 20¢, and perhaps not so coincidentally, it has done so with all four phone providers: T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint.

Kohl, a Democrat from Wisconsin, demanded that the cell phone companies show him paperwork about their price structures, including evidence of what made them decide to raise rates in such a dramatic way. The rate hikes, Kohl says, were "hardly consistent with the vigorous price competition we hope to see in a competitive marketplace," and he intends to look into them.

These days, it seems every business has a fee for everything. They're trying to supplement their earnings by charging customers for the most ridiculous things. Want to remove a service from your phone bill... pay a fee! Want to actually pay your Sprint bill? You're going to pay a fee for that too.

I don't blame a consumer for wanting to pay a bill in person. These days, you can't trust the U.S. Postal service to get your check there on time, and late payments can cause plenty of problems for bills from credit cards, to cable service, to wireless service. Online payments help the customer's cause, but not everyone wants to do them.

Michelle just wants to pay her Sprint bill at the Sprint store. What's so crazy about that? After all... the store is already there and the employees are there to help the customers, right?

As expected, Sprint has rolled out a new plan with unlimited wireless minutes in an effort to win back some of the market share it lost in recent years due to bad signals and poor customer service.

The "Unlimited Access Pack" is offering all of the following services on an unlimited basis: voice calling, nationwide texting, web surfing, email, picture mail. The cost is $119.99 per month, and is available on all sprint phones.

The catch? The plan is currently limited to San Francisco, Upper Central California, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Tampa. And of course, you will still be gouged for all the taxes and fees in addition to the $120 per month.

This sounds like a pretty good deal to me, and I'll be interested to see if users agree with me. For a company that specializes in alienating its customers, this sounds almost too good to be true. Apparently, starting tomorrow, Verizon will also start offering an unlimited minutes plan for $99.99. Let the price wars begin... and let consumers start taking advantage of them! It's about time we get to be in the driver's seat in the wireless market.

Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Accounting, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.

SprintNextel's new CEO Dan Hesse is trying to breathe some life back into the company. One of the strategic ideas he's tossing around is getting rid of tracking minutes for wireless plans. No one knows how soon it might happen, but we could see flat-rate wireless pricing on the horizon.

How cool would that be? I don't know about you, but I am so sick of regular minutes and night minutes and weekend minutes and free minutes and not-so-free minutes. I've always felt like I've gotten the shaft on these "minutes per month" plans.

Most of the time I fall way below my allotment of minutes. But a couple of times a year, I'll go way over the magic number, and I get a bill that's two or three times my regular bill. If wireless service providers want a way to make customers feel good, this might be it. The key is to offer reasonable flat rate plans.

Sure, we know some renegades will use a million minutes a month, and SprintNextel will feel like they've been taken advantage of. For most of us, though, a flat rate plan will not cause the phone company to lose out, and they might even generate some happy customers for once... now that we won't have to worry about how many minutes we're talking.

Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Accounting, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.