Beware of Cramming on Your Cellphone Bill

After reading this article, I realized this just happened to me. I ignored the messages (From "Brain Cool IQ"), thinking that they were spam. Didn't bother reading them. Thankfully I had not yet deleted them.

The first message, on Mar 8, advertised the service. Then, on Mar 22, I received three messages in a row. The first advertising the service, the second welcoming me to the service and inviting me to cancel with a "STOP" message, and the third with some stupid fact.

In my case, the STOP message, which I sent just about 20 minutes ago, seems to have worked. I got a response claiming I was unsubscribed from messages and fees.

I never subscribed to anything in the first place. This is fraud, plain and simple. In my case, I ignored the first advertisement sent on the 8th. Had I actually subscribed to this service, they wouldn't need to advertise it first. Since their first round of messages on Mar. 8 didn't succeed, I imagine they got bolder and decided to subscribe me (and everyone else in that batch) without my having asked.

Since this was from a few days ago, I cannot check to see if anything was billed to my Verizon account yet. That would show up on the next invoice. I did change my account settings right away, blocking all Premium SMS message services.

I do think the mobile phone companies are at the very least turning a blind eye to it; some very basic vetting, like making sure the company has an actual address at which they can receive postal mail that doesn't bounce, or terminating services that generate too large a percentage of fraud complaints, could catch a large portion of the worst offenders.

On my most recent phone bill I noticed an increase of about $10.00

Sure enough. By ignoring the text message and deleting it I was signed up of an unwanted $9.99 per month program.

I called ATT.

The ATT rep told me she would cancel the service immediately. She confirmed that by ignoring the text message I had "agreed" to the charges.

I told her that I wanted the $9.99 refunded. She said ATT would ONLY refund the $9.99 if I agreed to put in place a block on ALL future 3rd party charges on the cell phone bill.

I told her I wanted the block on all four of my cell phone lines immediately.

And I got the $9.99 refunded.

Long story short: ATT allows this because they benefit from this extremely anti-customer behavior.

The service I got crammed with was:

	 02/29/2012	 Saynow Alerts	 58497	 MT	 SayNow.com 

If you go to the www.mxtelecom.com it provides NO assistance what-so-ever.

According to the statement at www.saynow.com "SayNow has been acquired by Google, Inc. For media inquiries please contact press@google.com."

And now half of the malware and shady websites would ask for your phone number and then trick you into telling them the confirmation code.

I think that such services should be illegal in the first place. That's the only way to protect subscribers. And they need to be protected: imagine it can be your granny who will end up paying tens of dollars monthly for nothing (I've got the impression they don't even send the SMSes you "subscribed" to, just charge the money)

I can't imagine a SMS subscription worth ten bucks monthly. Every one of them is a fraud.

Amongst the irritation: it costs me to receive text messages. Right now I have an unlimited text plan, but it's a waste of money, since I have Google Voice and text using it. But I also receive spam texts to my main cellphone number- so if I cancelled my text plan I would actually be paying money to receive spam. Mind-bending.

I went to a Verizon shop to see if they could look at my records to see if I got charged, and they are in the dark about it until my next bill cycles over in 3 more weeks.

They also told me they don't do chargebacks for these, because it wasn't a Verizon charge. The manager there likened it to a roaming charge billed by another carrier. He had no real answer when I told him that this isn't like a roaming charge at all - I need to actually act by making a call or using data to attract a roaming charge, and I didn't do a thing to get this "premium message."

I waited until the end of my billing cycle to see if the charges actually were there. Sure enough, they were. I was almost in disbelief.

This is fraud, plain and simple. I called AT&T to dispute the charge and they did refund the money and put a block on my line for future charges.

But still as many have pointed out -- what of the many other people who do not notice the charge? It's clear to me that AT&T is to blame for allowing these companies a way to bill their customers and not policing them -- in this case the AT&T customer service rep admitted to knowing about cramming and how big a problem it is, even with this specific service. So other people have called about it and reported abuse, yet they have done nothing to ban the company. The burden here is clearly on the part of AT&T for letting these companies continue to bill people when they are implicitly aware of the fraud.

There really needs to be a big law firm that gets behind this and starts some class action litigation against the carriers. That seems to be the only way problems actually get fixed these days.

We didn't catch it for months. T-Mobile was kind enough to remove charges for a few months back, but said they couldn't remove anything beyond that. Which I felt was understandable.

What I didn't like was that the only way to block future versions of these was to block messaging entirely for that line, and to that (without blocking the other lines) was to pay for a service that let me set fine-grained restrictions on the lines.

See, it's my dad's line, and he's not tech-savvy, so he thought that ignoring them was the best way to go. I don't blame him, as that's the way it should be. Nobody should be able to add charges to your line without express permission.

That should include calling numbers that have a toll charge, too. It should actually ask you when you call the number if you're willing to pay the charge. Likewise for SMS messages. If not, the call/SMS won't go through.

Why this has managed to be this way for so long is beyond me. It only serves to promote fraud.

I called AT&T and they similarly to others' experience did not give any explanation as to why they permit third parties to initiate subscriptions without any explicit confirmation from users. Of course, I had them put on purchase block and refund my money, but I'm sure for everyone one of me there are 20 people who didn't notice or just happened to not look at their bill - I normally don't either. This is really unbelievable.

You would be eviscerated at every level if you tried to do this anywhere in the EU...

Not sure how this is possible, even in the US, since it should be a large risk to the carriers.

I'm puzzled by how this could possibly be legal.

i'll be first in line to sign up for twilio's pay as you go voice + data service.

....

Yeah.

If this was not the case then I would expect this to be much more prevalent , if you could start charing people so much money by simply sending an SMS then everyone and his dog would be at it.