THE Haggler’s last column apparently caused a lot of readers to take a close look at their cellphone bills, and many made a disturbing discovery: they had been crammed.
To recap, cramming is the unsavory act of tacking an unrequested service fee to a phone bill. It’s been a land-line scheme for years and now appears to be full-on scourge in the mobile phone world. Customers find themselves enrolled, without their consent, in a short-message service, or SMS, which delivers texts on celebrity gossip, dating and other kinds of invaluable information. The monthly fees — often in the $9 range — as well as the service come from third-party providers, which is a generic term for what are, in many instances, very shadowy companies that behave very badly.
In our last episode, a woman discovered that a Georgia-based company called Wise Media had crammed a $9.99 charge to her cellphone bill in recent months. Her carrier, AT&T, promptly refunded the charges, which turns out to be standard operating procedure, and may go a long way toward explaining why the outrage about cellphone cramming has not yet exploded like cartoon dynamite.
A handful of readers wrote last week to describe their own cramming and refund experiences. One crammee, Harry Wall of Larchmont, N.Y., found that two of five cellphones on his AT&T family plan had charges from Wise Media.
“Can’t figure out why those two were selected,” Mr. Wall wrote. “Anyway, I called AT&T and was initially told that the company has no responsibility for the charges — eight months of HoroscopeGenie from Wise Media. I was offered a credit for two months of payments, which prompted me to threaten to drop my service and join a lawsuit. I got a full refund. Then, I was told there would be a ‘block’ on future SMS charges from outside vendors. So here’s my question: Why isn’t there a block placed before the complaint?”
Why indeed? If a block on all third-party providers is possible, why not presume that all consumers want that block until they sign up for an SMS? In a sense, carriers have checked a box marked “by all means, add fees for useless services to this bill!” on behalf of cellphone owners nationwide. Why not make us opt in, instead of forcing us to opt out, especially because so many people have no idea that they are being charged in the first place?
This question was first posed to Debra Lewis, a spokeswoman at Verizon. “There are lots of legitimate content providers out there, and there are a lot of people who want their services, for weather updates, for sports scores,” Ms. Lewis said.
She continued: “We have a lot of auditing and monitoring in place, and when we find out that content providers aren’t complying, we shut them down. I’d say that Verizon has been pretty aggressive in terms of going after these guys when they harm customers.”
Brad Burns, a spokesman for AT&T, said carriers required a “double opt-in process.” A customer enters a wireless phone number seeking third-party content, he explained, then the content provider sends the customer a password which the customer then enters into the content provider’s purchase page. “Accordingly,” Mr. Burns went on, “it takes two conscious acts by the customer to purchase the third-party content.”
That sounds like a fine system for third-party providers that play by the rules. But many don’t, as was clear from a recent Senate committee investigation into land-line cramming. The investigation put the amount of that cramming at $2 billion a year. In March, Senator Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, announced that Verizon had agreed to end third-party billing on land lines, with very limited exceptions. AT&T offered an identical ban a week later. Both carriers will phase in this ban in coming months.
Why would these companies think it’s a good idea to end third-party billing on land lines, but not cellphones?
Because of that opt-in process, Ms. Lewis wrote in an e-mail, “Charges for third-party services billed by Verizon Wireless do not suffer from the same authentication problems that the wire line business has addressed.”
This would seem a more compelling argument were it not clear that many third-party providers are cramming, rather than walking a straight-and-narrow “double opt-in” path. Both AT&T and Verizon deflected any talk of financial upsides of this whole SMS arrangement, but it’s generally understood that roughly one-third to half of the revenue generated by third-party providers goes to carriers. Which leads the Haggler to believe that if the SMS system were set up by a disinterested party, rather than one that is sharing the profit, it would look much more consumer-friendly.
AND now some odds and ends as we wrap up our two-part episode on cramming: The Haggler asked the Federal Communications Commission to explain what’s so hard about cracking down on this con — but received a response so anodyne and unilluminating that, as an act of mercy to both readers and the F.C.C. it won’t be excerpted here. AT&T and Verizon both said that they would block all third-party charges for any customer who calls and requests such a block, at no charge. If you’ve been crammed by Wise Media and want to complain, you can do so through the Georgia governor’s Office of Consumer Protection, at consumer.ga.gov. Tell ‘em the Haggler sent you.
AT&T, meantime, said it would not allow Wise Media to sell any “new content” to consumers, which means that if you signed up for HoroscopeGenie, rest assured that you’ll continue to get it. And if you didn’t sign up for HoroscopeGenie, but are currently getting it anyway, fret not it’ll keep coming.
To recap, cramming is the unsavory act of tacking an unrequested service fee to a phone bill. It’s been a land-line scheme for years and now appears to be full-on scourge in the mobile phone world. Customers find themselves enrolled, without their consent, in a short-message service, or SMS, which delivers texts on celebrity gossip, dating and other kinds of invaluable information. The monthly fees — often in the $9 range — as well as the service come from third-party providers, which is a generic term for what are, in many instances, very shadowy companies that behave very badly.
In our last episode, a woman discovered that a Georgia-based company called Wise Media had crammed a $9.99 charge to her cellphone bill in recent months. Her carrier, AT&T, promptly refunded the charges, which turns out to be standard operating procedure, and may go a long way toward explaining why the outrage about cellphone cramming has not yet exploded like cartoon dynamite.
A handful of readers wrote last week to describe their own cramming and refund experiences. One crammee, Harry Wall of Larchmont, N.Y., found that two of five cellphones on his AT&T family plan had charges from Wise Media.
“Can’t figure out why those two were selected,” Mr. Wall wrote. “Anyway, I called AT&T and was initially told that the company has no responsibility for the charges — eight months of HoroscopeGenie from Wise Media. I was offered a credit for two months of payments, which prompted me to threaten to drop my service and join a lawsuit. I got a full refund. Then, I was told there would be a ‘block’ on future SMS charges from outside vendors. So here’s my question: Why isn’t there a block placed before the complaint?”
Why indeed? If a block on all third-party providers is possible, why not presume that all consumers want that block until they sign up for an SMS? In a sense, carriers have checked a box marked “by all means, add fees for useless services to this bill!” on behalf of cellphone owners nationwide. Why not make us opt in, instead of forcing us to opt out, especially because so many people have no idea that they are being charged in the first place?
This question was first posed to Debra Lewis, a spokeswoman at Verizon. “There are lots of legitimate content providers out there, and there are a lot of people who want their services, for weather updates, for sports scores,” Ms. Lewis said.
She continued: “We have a lot of auditing and monitoring in place, and when we find out that content providers aren’t complying, we shut them down. I’d say that Verizon has been pretty aggressive in terms of going after these guys when they harm customers.”
Brad Burns, a spokesman for AT&T, said carriers required a “double opt-in process.” A customer enters a wireless phone number seeking third-party content, he explained, then the content provider sends the customer a password which the customer then enters into the content provider’s purchase page. “Accordingly,” Mr. Burns went on, “it takes two conscious acts by the customer to purchase the third-party content.”
That sounds like a fine system for third-party providers that play by the rules. But many don’t, as was clear from a recent Senate committee investigation into land-line cramming. The investigation put the amount of that cramming at $2 billion a year. In March, Senator Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, announced that Verizon had agreed to end third-party billing on land lines, with very limited exceptions. AT&T offered an identical ban a week later. Both carriers will phase in this ban in coming months.
Why would these companies think it’s a good idea to end third-party billing on land lines, but not cellphones?
Because of that opt-in process, Ms. Lewis wrote in an e-mail, “Charges for third-party services billed by Verizon Wireless do not suffer from the same authentication problems that the wire line business has addressed.”
This would seem a more compelling argument were it not clear that many third-party providers are cramming, rather than walking a straight-and-narrow “double opt-in” path. Both AT&T and Verizon deflected any talk of financial upsides of this whole SMS arrangement, but it’s generally understood that roughly one-third to half of the revenue generated by third-party providers goes to carriers. Which leads the Haggler to believe that if the SMS system were set up by a disinterested party, rather than one that is sharing the profit, it would look much more consumer-friendly.
AND now some odds and ends as we wrap up our two-part episode on cramming: The Haggler asked the Federal Communications Commission to explain what’s so hard about cracking down on this con — but received a response so anodyne and unilluminating that, as an act of mercy to both readers and the F.C.C. it won’t be excerpted here. AT&T and Verizon both said that they would block all third-party charges for any customer who calls and requests such a block, at no charge. If you’ve been crammed by Wise Media and want to complain, you can do so through the Georgia governor’s Office of Consumer Protection, at consumer.ga.gov. Tell ‘em the Haggler sent you.
AT&T, meantime, said it would not allow Wise Media to sell any “new content” to consumers, which means that if you signed up for HoroscopeGenie, rest assured that you’ll continue to get it. And if you didn’t sign up for HoroscopeGenie, but are currently getting it anyway, fret not it’ll keep coming.
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