AT&T’s Mysterious “Mobile Purchases & Downloads Charges”
I’ve been with AT&T Wireless for about 10 years. Overall, outside of the lack of urban coverage and dropped calls, I’ve been pretty happy; both cell and customer service wise. But sooner or later, I feel corporate companies such as AT&T eventually succumb to just giving up on their customer.
Today, I received my AT&T wireless bill payment received notice, and realized that it was around $10 more than usual. My bill is always around a certain amount, so this raised a serious question with me about AT&T and my bill.
I logged into myAT&T, and looked at my bill. I found a new section in my bill that I’ve never before seen. “Mobile Purchases & Downloads Charges.”
Interesting. A new mysterious $9.99 charge right there. What was this? Where and how did this happen? And what did I sign up for unknowingly?
Looking at my bill, on January 17th I received 3 random SMS messages,
from a random new 77910 short code. I’ve never seen this short code, and my first thought was this was spam. After receiving those messages, I gave in and replied “STOP” to end this spam texting in hopes of not getting any more spam messages. And I never did.
So I began my investigation. After calling the AT&T business enterprise customer service and describing my situation, he told me some very interesting information. Apparently AT&T allows third party companies to sign customers up via texts or phone calls, for “mobile content subscriptions”. The rep continues to tell me that apps are allowed to sign up customers for this thing. Being a iOS developer, there is NO app that I’m aware of that is allowed to do this without going through Apple’s ecosystem. So what else can this be? He goes onto say that he’d be glad to credit my account and asked me if I wanted to enable “Purchase Block”. I said yes and the conversation continued smoothly, but I wanted to know more. I wanted to know why, and how! I asked him how can this even happen? His reply was that he didn’t know. After putting me on hold and doing some more research, he still couldn’t find any useful information. Not helpful at all. Don’t get me wrong; I was grateful that he made me aware of this unknown subscription blocker, and for crediting my account, but that’s not enough. That doesn’t solve the real problem. Thus I’ve asked him, and AT&T for that matter, to provide me some more details on this.
As a consumer, this raises some serious questions and concerns:
- How can third party companies do this and is this even legal?
- How can I be charged for some spam subscription I replied “STOP” to?
- Why should I, as a consumer, have to enable this “block” subscription utility on my account; a utility I was previously unaware even existed?
- And how, after explicitly sending a “STOP” text, did I sign up for some unexplainable subscription?
AT&T, I’d like some answers.
