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! 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.

Nice job !! ATT can be a royal pain.

Oddly I pay $45 per month unlimited talk, text and data. On my iPhone on AT&T. And I am 100% protected from any of these charges.

Go figure, those who pay more get screwed more. Its a miracle you got a refund at all! AT&T have lost customers over this exact same issue. They end up eating the cost usually, hence the improbable refunds. Congrats indeed!

AT&T has usually been pretty flexible and willing to work with me, in my experience.
(1) Giving me a new iPhone at contract price a year before my contract expiration, after the old iPhone 4 crapped the bed and CrApple refused to help in any meaningful way
(2) Reversing charges from my phone picking up voicemail in France, even though I had only turned it on briefly in order to switch it to airplane/wifi mode
(3) Reversing charges from "roaming in Mexico" when I was in Chula Vista and the phone picked up a signal from across the border
(4) Reversing charges due to SMS spam

My bill is very constant - if it varies by more than $1, I get worried and check very closely.

We had something similar happen with Verizon. After explaining to them that my wife has been with them since they were LA Cellular in SoCal, and that we had no issue finding another carrier, our extra charges were credited as well.

They like having long term customers...She's been with them since either '96 or '97. I was with them since '93 when they were known as Airtouch Cellular in Ohio, and we merged our accounts when we were dating.

I know of 5 departments of AT&T (Aggravation, Trial & Tribulation). TV, Land Line, Cell, Advertisement and Internet. The only reason I didn't have a beef wih TV is because our company didn't have TV.

With the Advertisement, they were supposed to get us a web page. They did put out a rough web page and would refine it but they said that I have a month to make any changes. I asked them to put the text in a FAQ page. No problem. 3 months, many FAQ page faxes and much yelling and screaming, I finally go my FAQ page up.

With the internet, when it works, it works. When it is down, you get on your knees and pray. I called in for a dead connection. They would get back in a half hour. 3 hrs later, they told me some flooding of the server room occured and they don't have an ETA. 4 days later, I discovered it was fixed. All our business was running with internet is it was a royal PITA plus the daily lack of knowledge as to when it would be up.

Land line when it worked, it was ok. When we moved, I told them to disconnect one line and leave a forwarding message to the office cell. Didn't work out well. Our fax line was moved and they left. 2 days later, I found out it wasn't working. Called them back and refused to let them leave till I tested it out. Great. A few weeks later, it died again and they could not bring it back. They came out to find that the lines were somehow paired badly or something. Finally after an couple more times, the fax line was working.

Cell phone. We got a free Blackberry to try out. Had issues and finally returned it to the store. Well, a month later I found a mobile bill charged to my land line. Called land line and they said "That is mobile. You have to call them." It took mobile 100 mins to finally sort it out. Apparently, the clerk did not remove the SIM card. Gave them my name, address, SSN, and what not and got passed around like a $2 whore in a prison from person to person. They even asked me what the long serial number was. What part of I returned it didn't you get? Finally got it fixed and removed any 3rd party billing to the land line and made sure that they did NOT automatically draw from the bank. Paper check only.

In conclusion, even if you gave me AT&T service, I wouldn't take it if there was an alternative even if it was slightly higher in cost.

Mistake #1: expecting your ISP to do the work of a web designer.

SUPPOSEDLY the had web designers. Still, they did a template and it had several pages. All they had to do was put in the text for the FAQ. They kept losing the faxes and emails I sent them and then I had to resend.

I don't know if they are an ISP since it wasn't the ISP department that handled it. It was their Advertisement department. SUPPOSEDLY they create web pages and have some sort of counters so they can do tracking since they guaranteed a certain number of hits. In their defense, it did work since 9 months after we cut them off, people still called and when asked, they say they saw it on some search engine.

I had no choice since AT&T was the only company that would service that spot. Finally Time Warner came in.

Domain name. Outside hosting. Your ISP doesn't have to be your domain host (and usually isn't).

AT&T is a pain when it comes to customer service for its internet service. I have called them to resolve issues several times and I am always sent around different departments because no one knows what to do and constantly put on hold. Granted I finally do find someone to help but sometimes it can take hours. I once was on the phone with them for 3 hours when our connection stopped working at our house. They finally sent out people the next morning and it was repaired. Recently we had the internet go out again because a tree limb took out the phone line a ways down the road and it took 5 days for them to come out to repair it even though we called on the first day and they said they would be out there the next morning.

Sounds like you got hoodwinked.

Here are some FCC links, FCC is pretty useless though when it comes to customer issues.

Cell Phone Fraud | FCC.gov
Complaints | FCC.gov

I've heard that people have had good luck by threatening to defect to another carrier.

I use prepaid wireless carriers, quite a bit less expensive over the contract term, cheap and easy to fire them.

They didn't allow me to do that. Either I sign up with them for advertisement, in which case they created the page on a site of their concoction or I don't. They were NOT the ISP division, AFAIK since I did get a different bill and contract from them. OF COURSE my mistake was even talking to them. So this wasn't thru the ISP division but the advertisement division.

Why even threaten? Just move. IIRC, many have a 30 day satisfaction guarantee. If my contract is up or soon up, I would try another carrier out and walk if it didn't work out. I tried a different carrier that way and found that the signal strength was so weak that in my office, I missed half my calls. Unacceptable so I dumped them.

Buy/register domain name. Sign up for a hosting package. Hire a web design co. Let them handle advertising :)

how the crap do you get that for $45? My bill is like $85 a month for 500 minutes, 2 GB data, and unlimited texts. The only thing I can think of is you trimmed a SIM from a go phone to fit the iPhone.