Six Defendants Charged In Manhattan Federal Court In Multimillion-Dollar Text Messaging Consumer Fraud Scheme
Defendants Fraudulently Charged Hundreds of Thousands of Mobile Phone Customers More Than $50 Million for Text Messaging Services Without Their Knowledge or Consent
... with participating in a scheme to charge mobile phone customers tens of millions of dollars in monthly fees for unsolicited, recurring text messages about topics such as horoscopes, celebrity gossip, and trivia facts, without the customers' knowledge or consent - a practice the defendants referred to as "auto-subscribing."
... engaged in a multimillion-dollar scheme to defraud consumers by placing unauthorized charges for premium text messaging services on consumers' cellular phone bills
... The consumers who received the unsolicited text messages typically ignored or deleted the messages, often believing them to be spam. Regardless, the consumers were billed for the receipt of the messages, at a rate of $9.99 per month, through charges that typically appeared on the consumers' cellular telephone bills in an abbreviated and confusing form
... Even then, consumers' attempts to dispute the charges and obtain refunds from the Texting Company or from the Texting Company's Affiliates were often unsuccessful
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- curiously (or not) nothing in the press release about the billing practices of the cellular companies themselves or whether they helped, or hindered...
_____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key snipped-for-privacy@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]