Crime Pays When You’re a Phone Crammer

Of all the things that disgust me in life, the idea of it being okay to charge customers left right and center for every possible thing under the moon, including things they didn’t ask for, ranks high on the list. Not sure what I am talking about? Look no further than the entire telco industry, where it’s not uncommon to have a $5 or higher ‘service charge’ tacked on your bill each month. What’s it do? Nothing, of course. It’s just a given.

The same problem applies to other areas as well, such as cable and Internet, but telcos have been nickel and diming like this since the 80s, and possibly even before. With one cell phone provider I used to be with, even if I used the same exact services each month, my total bill would always be just a bit higher or lower each month. It’s as if the company simply decided on a whim what to charge me for certain services.

Even worse than a $5 service charge? A $15 one, for a service you might not even realize you have, and certainly didn’t opt in for. The term for this practice is called ‘cramming’, which is the simple act of someone else either tricking you into opting for a service or for it to be added by some other means. Up until a couple of years ago, I hadn’t even heard of this term, but interestingly when I did first learn of it was with an article from the same Ars Technica writer as linked to below, Nate Anderson.

A Senate Commerce Committee investigator recently became so interested in the legality of cramming that he decided to conduct some in-depth research and see how it all worked. What he found was incredibly disturbing. I’ll leave the Ars article to explain everything in more detail, but as a quick teaser, this investigator discovered that there were no high scores listed on a $15 mobile gaming site he wound up being subscribed to, yet there were a reported 20,000 subscribers. That’s nearly $1,000,000 in revenue earned from people who aren’t even using the service they are paying for. Sounds about as nice as the aforementioned service charge, aye?

The sad fact is, getting signed up for these services isn’t uncommon to happen without you even knowing, so for that reason it’s important to closely monitor all of your bills. In Nate’s linked-to article above, he literally had four services he didn’t agree to appear on his bill due to something simple he did (of course he didn’t opt for anything).

Worst still, a lot of these ‘crammers’ are affecting lines that might not even be used at all, and many belong to government buildings, commercial businesses and in a couple of cases, even banks. If none of that hits the point home, many of these crammers wind up on lines of numbers that have never been published – there’s some brute-force cramming action for you.

There’s a Senate hearing to occur this week to discuss this issue, and we can only hope that it will result in telcos being far more protective of their customers. As the article suggests though, many telcos may not even want this responsibility. Why? Many of them profit from these practices. Ugh.