Check that bill

According to the charges that appeared on my phone/Internet bill last month, I signed up for some form of voicemail from MyIProducts Imail for $14.95 a month. Maybe I spent much of the month drunk, as I also appear to have signed up for a similar voicemail service from Orbit Telecom, again at the staggering rate of $14.95 a month. A closer look at the bill shows that I may have been high as well, since I went ahead and signed up for a third voicemail service from Selected Services, Inc. At least I showed better financial judgment this time; it cost only $12.95.



One of the many services I did not sign up for

Finally, because my three voicemail accounts just weren't enough, my AT&T bill included yet one more $14.95 monthly charge from a company called OneMailADay, LLC. Their product? Some kind of daily e-mail digest, the point of which manages to escape me still.

The bottom line from this weirdness: my AT&T bill doubled from $50 to $100 because of the four charges, and the charges would recur every month until the end of time.

After giving the matter careful thought, I concluded that I had been neither drunk nor high during the previous month and, unless my seventeen-month old had signed up for a series of voicemail services, I was being scammed. The first hour after this realization was spent concocting elaborate scenarios under which the scammers in question would suffer the torments of the damned (or at least of the Illinois correctional system), but this turned out to be an unproductive use of my time.

Instead, I set out to learn what had happened, stop it from happening again, and recover all of my money. What I found along the way was troubling: this sort of thing could happen to you, too, with no warning and no verification, and your own phone company can't help you resolve it.

Welcome to Crammerville

What happened to me (and what happens to thousands of others each month) is known as "cramming." The Federal Trade Commission calls this "the practice of placing unauthorized, misleading, or deceptive charges on your telephone bill. Crammers rely on confusing telephone bills in an attempt to trick consumers into paying for services they did not authorize or receive, or that cost more than the consumer was led to believe."

Your phone company will generally pass along third-party charges, assuming that they are valid. And they can be; all sorts of charges (such as collect calls) can actually be billed to your account by telecom companies but, for obvious reasons like the total lack of verification, this system is also a scam magnet.

When I called AT&T, the customer service rep sympathized but could do nothing. The charges had not come from AT&T, I was told, and the company simply had no involvement with them. What I could do was request a block on such third-party charges, but the block would also prevent AT&T from processing any credit that the companies might issue for the charges. These credits might take two or even three billing cycles. In the meantime, these companies or others could continue to add charges to each new bill. This cycle could continue indefinitely.

Surely, given just how common the practice has become, there was a better way to handle the situation?

I was told that there was not. The pause in our conversation was filled with the grinding of my teeth.

Surely, I continued, it couldn't possibly be true that any billing company on the planet could simply charge me whatever it wanted just by entering my phone number?

I was told that it could. Then, cheerfully: "Is there anything else I can help you with today, Mr. Anderson?"

I hung up the phone, jogged to the gym, and spent the rest of the hour punching a body bag. It didn't help.