Beware of Cramming on Your Cellphone Bill

I believe that the carriers should be forced to a "sender pays" model for SMS or be required to give people the ability to opt out of them.

I received the three messages while I was reading the linked article! My messages came from "MobibroIQ". I did not respond.

I logged in to AT&T and launched a chat with Technical Support. I indicated in my description that I wanted to place a purchase block for 3rd party services billed to SMS. The entire exchange took about 10 minutes. I received an email for each line on my account indicating the purchase block had been activated and that a PIN code would be required for charges to apply. AT&T reported that the change could take up to 90 minutes to take effect. As I am typing this, I received a message from this "MobibroIQ" stating, "This msg confirms that u have discontinued and will no longer receive messages or charges for this service..."

Again, I did not reply "STOP."

I hope this solution is as painless and simple for you as it was for me.

EDIT: Follow up message from AT&T "To confirm, purchase blockers have been added to all lines and also checked your line #### & cancelled a subscript.charge for $9.99, will see credit next bill"

This happened to my father. Not from this company, but from others.

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.

believe its true in canada as well..... automatically signing anyone up for something they didnt agree to is generally outright fraud............