AT&T Wireless Unauthorized Charges
 

You should be aware there are a number of scams which fraudulently commit cell phone users to charges they did not authorize. My wife pays our cell phone bill and I don't review it. She did not notice we were receiving charges that we never authorized. When I looked into it, I discovered we were being charged $9.99 per month for more than a year for mobile purchases we did not make. (In her defense, the paper bill is needlessly complicated with lots of code words for taxes and fees. We went with the electronic bill a while ago and you have to really dig around to find these type of charges.)

I Googled the name listed on one of the charges (Bullroare) and now understand they send you unsolicited texts of something like celebrity gossip or trivia. They tell you to text "stop" back to them if you want to stop receiving their garbage. When you do, they somehow turn that in to an authorization you want to buy their monthly service and they report this to AT&T. AT&T then happily adds this to your cryptic bill and (I assume) pockets a few percentage points of the charge for their trouble.

I figured out I had paid a total of $324 over the last 15 months for this crap! I contacted AT&T and went through a lengthy discussion with their customer service. Four days later, a $294 credit appeared on my online bill. They refunded all the charges back one year. I could have pushed them for the extra $30, but didn't.

I was polite, but firm. My mention of contacting my state attorney general's office and a potential class action lawsuit against the perps AND AT&T may have gotten me some mileage in this case. I may still do that.

If you have AT&T wireless, go to their website and examine your bill. First you need to select view bill details, then you select usage details for one of your phone numbers. There's a drop down box somewhere that lets you see charges by the categories talk, text and mobile purchases. These unauthorized charges showed up in my mobile purchases.

Here are some of the names associated with unauthorized charges on my bill:

• Bullroare
• IQ2CALL8888906150
• Words/Definition ale
• SCORE BOARD SMS ALTS
• MFC games/tones/wall
• BidandWin FROM EagleWebAssets

If you see any of these on your bill and you did not authorize them, maybe you should call AT&T customer care at 1-800-331-0500. I recorded my calls using a speaker phone and my iPhone voice memo, just in case.

Is there a particular reason this is on the ML forum???

Nope. Posted here by accident. When I realized it, I tried to delete it but don't see how to do it. I have re-posted to Open Discussion. If a mod sees this here, please delete it. Thanks.