Friday, February 10, 2012

Always Worth Checking Your Bills

I was about to pay my AT&T Wireless bill and I noticed it was a little high. I couldn't drill down into all the sections in the web site version of the bill but there was a "Paper Bill" link that brought up a full bill. I noticed this:

Screen shot 2012 02 10 at 3 16 39 PM

You can rest assured I have never ordered "Fun SMS Alerts" for anything. I called AT&T about it. I talked to Bonnie who I'm sorry to say had to recite all these long helpful sounding but useless sentences to me but I know it's not her fault and she was indeed helpful. She looked up those codes, 96953 which said "Entertainment" and 20176 which said it was 3 fun messages a month. I explained that doesn't really mean anything and that I didn't subscribe to these from my phone.

I checked my SMS messages and I have gotten some spam messages. I still forward them to 7726 as AT&T instructed me. I'm not sure it's done much. I also now occasionally reply "STOP" or "NO" as instructed. I've heard it's supposed to work and be legit now, but I haven't seen it have any real effect. I didn't see any sms conversations (I never delete them) that applied around Jan 22nd.

This is the first time I've been billed for such bullshit. Notice in the bill under "Content Provider" it says "Cobalt Capital Group LLC" and http://notapplicable.com/. Obviously the URL is useless. Google shows some similar named REIT and other investment companies, but then I found, this and this and I think I'm tired of tracking it down. I mentioned to Bonnie that it should be illegal for the listed Content Provider to be useless forgeries but she just skipped by that comment.

Supposedly in the next 4 hours my account will be credited for $9.99 and I have been unsubscribed from these Fun SMS Alerts.

So check your bills.

2 comments:

The Dad said...

This is one of the reasons I don't have a texting plan and we've asked ATT to block ALL incoming texts. Now that my wife has an iPhone, we text each other and about 75% of our friends using iMessage. The others we text using the TextFree app. So far, so good.

AM said...

Had the same thing on my daughters phone. They put a block on her account so it can't happen again. AT&T was very nice about it.