Telecom Expense Management Blog

Just another reminder on how important it is to monitor usage on phone bills. These fees weren't limited to consumers they also affected corporate owned cell phones. Even though you can block services it doesn't mean random charges for blocked services won't show up on an invoice.

As it states in the AP article on the AT&T settlement:

In some cases, Edelson said, charges for ringtones have shown up on bills for wireless laptop data cards, which have phone numbers but no way to use ring tones. That points to "cramming," or providers signing up customers without their knowledge.

And they also mention that these aren't just one time charges, like we find on local phone lines, a lot of these are recurring charges.

Vendors of ringtones and daily text-message services with horoscopes and jokes solicit customers to sign up by entering their phone numbers on Web sites or by sending text messages. The charges, which can be hidden or poorly explained, show up later on cell-phone bills, often as recurring charges.

Notifications will soon go out to 70 million current AT&T Mobility customers. To read the complete settlement: http://www.thirdpartycontentrefund.com/

What is Third Party Mobile Content? Third party mobile content is a product (such as ringtones, games, graphics and news or other alerts) that may be purchased and downloaded to your wireless device and is advertised, marketed and sold directly by a third party content provider/merchant other than AT&T Mobility. Third party mobile content is not advertised, marketed or directly sold by AT&T Mobility.

We routinely find these charges on invoices we process. All charges in this category would automatically be flagged for review by our software. Start a free trial today and see the results in 48 hours.