I think a major reason they did this was because of customers abusing buy-one-get-one-free offers on smartphones. Under the old fees structure it was possible to buy two and resell/terminate on one device, thus leading to a net profit at the expense of Verizon

They've been doing that on Celebrity Jeopardy for years!

"I'll take Catch the semen for $800"

this sounds a lot like what happened to the direcTV hackers, actually...