Earlier this month, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a lawsuit against T-Mobile alleging that the company engaged in a practice known as “cramming.” Cramming occurs when phone providers place unauthorized, misleading or deceptive charges on their customers’ phone bills, typically for services that are provided through third-party merchants.
If you had unauthorized charges for “premium services” on your T-Mobile bill, we would like to hear about your experience. Contact us today using our free case review form.
According to the lawsuit, T-Mobile crammed charges for “premium” SMS subscriptions without customers’ authorization and collected millions in kickbacks for these services. These subscriptions included ringtones, wallpapers, and text messages that provide horoscopes, flirting tips and even celebrity gossip, for which customers were allegedly billed a $9.99 monthly “usage charge.”
The FTC alleges that these “usage charges” often didn’t have any description about the services for which customers were being charged and even when they did have descriptions, they were difficult to understand. In the complaint, the FTC uses an example of a customer’s bill where a $9.99 fee for “usages charges” appears, but does not elaborate on the specific services for the charges. Later in the bill, T-Mobile allegedly described these services as “8888906150 BrnStorm23918,” a charge for trivia text alerts.
Charges for so-called “premium services” were also difficult to detect on T-Mobile’s lengthy and complicated bills, according to the suit. T-Mobile allegedly buried these, albeit vague, descriptions more than 50 pages into customers’ bills. When customers did detect the unauthorized charges and complained, T-Mobile, in many cases, refused to provide full refunds.
The FTC also claims that T-Mobile received millions of dollars in kickbacks for these unauthorized charges. According to the lawsuit, the cell phone provider receives a percentage of the total amount charged to customers when they register for third-party services, and many of these kickbacks can be up to 40 percent of monthly charges.
Despite coverage from the media on third-party merchants failing to obtain authorization from customers, as well as customer complaints about unauthorized charges, T-Mobile failed to investigate these matters and continued billing customers for unauthorized services, the lawsuit alleges.
If you had unauthorized charges for “premium services” on your T-Mobile bill, we would like to hear about your experience. Contact us today using our free case review form.
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