A computer glitch resulted in multiple charges for about 6,000 people looking to donate to TV show American Idol's request for donors last week.
The TV show's "Idol Gives Back" is by any measure a success - it has raised almost $70 million to provide for children who live in poverty - but that success has apparently overwhelmed the system designed to handle the donations, charging some charity-givers two or three times.
Doug Livingston, president of L.A.-based Patriot Communications, which was contracted to process donations, told Newsday banks and credit card companies could not process orders as fast as they came in. This forced the company to "batch" some donations for later. "In the initial batches, there was a small number that went through more than once," Livingston said. He said the problem affected less than 1% of about 800,000 individual donations.
Charity Projects Entertainment Fund for which most of the money was donated said it has begun the process to refund the overcharged money.
But computer system malfunctions have been at the heart of many American Idol controversies. Recently the show has faced vote counting problems laid at the doorstep of the computer/telephony system that counts the all-important votes.
While overzealous fans have accused Fox of tampering with results, one fact is indisputable: Technology is thwarting democracy on American Idol, and article on the Broadcasting and Cable Website said. Power-dialers can skew the vote. Text-messagers have an unfair advantage. And potential hackers have a powerful new incentive to alter the vote tallies: betting on the outcome through Internet gambling sites. Despite fans' repeated accusations of inaccurate results, Fox is sticking with a voting system vulnerable to serious manipulation and tampering, the site says.
The Broadcasting and Cable site says interviews with telephone companies, data consultants, federal agencies, and fans expose a flawed system in which tens of millions of votes are potentially lost. Indeed, evidence shows that the only people choosing the next American Idol are the ones lucky enough to get through-or skilled enough to get around-tremendously overtaxed phone lines.
Meanwhile the Federal Trade Commission hit Telemarketing, a Utah firm trying to cash in on misdialed American Idol votes, with a $40,000 in fines. Prior to the show, Telemarketing bought phone numbers similar to those for Idol, then told viewers who misdialed that they had to call a second 900 number to actually place their "vote." The fees for those "votes" ranged from $1.99 to $2.97 per call. And the FCC has received over 1,000 complaints about the phone system and American Idol voting, the site says.
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