[LittleBreezes]

Hi all, I am going to reply to this with the hope of not being flamed, but something tells me I will be nevertheless. One of my fiance's cousins is a long time supervisor at VZ and I posed a very similar question to her. As it turns out there is a field in your account record that can be set to a data cap (usually 50MB or 5GB), however that is rarely what causes the red flag to go up for closer scrutinization of any account. What triggers the red flag is usually one or more of several characteristics that they find unlikely to occur if data is used only on the device. I don't recall the entire laundry list but some of the included items are use of an incoming port, outgoing ports other then the normal 25, 110, 143, 80, 443, etc, packets sent to certain destination address (online gaming, file sharing, etc), file transmissions that are unusually large, data link speeds that are more consistant with USB/Bluetooth, etc. I don't remember everything but there are lots of fingerprints of tethering, irregardless of how it is masked on the device. She told me that as a general rule the first time a customer call in and denies it they readily remove the charges but any subsequent billing cycle that displays similar activity will result in a hard fast per kilobyte charge.
hth
Frank