Evil text charges: a cautionary tale

I just got off the phone with our wireless provider (AT&T) over a very interesting issue. Being the Apple fangirl that I am I was pretty excited about the iPhone 5 announcement and decided to take a look at our account and see what our eligibility dates were. As it turns out, Chuck qualifies for “early iPhone upgrade” pricing. I qualify for squat. What does that mean? Well, for instance, I only qualify for the “off contract” price of $649 for the 16GB versus $199 for folks who qualify for a new 2-year contract. Chuck’s price is “only” $499). So that was pretty disappointing. Guess we’ll be holding onto our iPhone 4S’s for a while. So it goes. That’s not the real point of this post.

While I was trolling around our billing page looking for this info, I took a quick look at our bill and noticed a funny little bump over the past few months. $10 a month for two months then $20 this month. This made me very curious so I looked at the detailed view of the bill and encountered the following charges attached to my phone number:

Say what? I had no idea what these “subscriptions” were and I had no idea how I had gotten signed up for them. I did a bit more digging and saw that the first one appeared a few months ago but we didn’t pay attention – we just assumed the slight variation was taxes or fees – we use autopay so we don’t pay all that much attention to the monthly bill, especially when the variation is plus or minus $10. And then it occurred to me what had happened. I don’t know about you, but I get several junk texts a month – stuff from numbers (versus names) which I faithfully delete. If I cast my mind back, though, I remember that on occasion I may have clicked on the link in the text – an innocent mistake that apparently signed me up for some bogus fee service. And these third party scammers lay in wait for suckers like me and will just keep charging for their “service” until we text them STOP or we notice the charges and contact our service providers.

I asked the AT&T customer service person what she could do, and she very nicely said that they would look back in my bill(s) and refund the charges that I had incurred, and that I could also sign up for a free purchase blocker option that would prevent these scammers from being able to text me in the first place. Amusingly, this is part of a parental controls package which says to me that kids a re more likely to fall victim to this scam than adults (doesn’t say much for me, I guess). So I signed my number and Chuck’s number up for that service and now feel glad that I even found out about this and also feel like a rube for falling for the scam in the first place.

Consider yourselves warned. And check your cell phone bills! More info on blocking mobile phone spam can be found here.

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