If you are a mobile phone user residing in the U.S., chances are you would have fallen under this particular category – to be a victim of ‘cramming’. Basically, ‘cramming’ involves unauthorized charges into your mobile phone bill, and the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee did share that U.S. phone users could have ended up paying a total to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars over time throughout these years.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, shared, “Scammers figured out a way to beat the system. They have been absolutely relentless in doing so.”
How does cramming work? It more often than not starts with small companies that deliver juicy details such as celebrity gossip, ring tones or other similar services to your device. All money will be collected by cellphone providers however, and that would include the major players such as AT&T, T-Mobile US, Verizon, or Sprint, where the revenue is then split between the small companies and the cellphone providers.
There are select carrier policies that empowers vendors to bill consumers non-stop even when the vendors had gone through a few months of non-stop high consumer refund rates, with certain documents pointing to such a practice continuing in spite of vendor refund rates which topped 50% of monthly revenues at times. Hopefully such a practice will be put to a stop, and that there will be proper enforcement carried out in due time.
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