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| Photo by Mike Mozart. |
Federal regulators on Tuesday accused T-Mobile of bilking customers out of hundreds of millions of dollars in third-party charges on phone bills for premium services such as flirting tips and celebrity gossip that customers never authorized.
In a lawsuit filed in Seattle, the Federal Trade Commission said T-Mobile engaged in a practice known as cramming: putting unauthorized, misleading or deceptive charges on phone bills.
Customers typically were billed $9.99 a month for the SMS text message subscriptions from third-party providers. T-Mobile received 35% to 40% of the fees, with the rest going to the provider of the service.
T-Mobile did not obtain permission from customers for the charges, which were “nearly impossible” to notice because they were buried in lengthy bills, the FTC said. The improper charges date to at least 2009 and the company should have known the charges were unauthorized because of high requests from consumers for refunds.
“It’s wrong for a company like T-Mobile to profit from third-party charges when there were clear warning signs those charges were fraudulent,” said Jessica Rich, the agency’s consumer protection director.
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