[iamleppert]

I also had this happen to me. Some daily joke service sent me a text message at 4 AM in the morning, followed by another message a second later stating I was now subscribed and would be billed $9.99 per month.

I waited until the end of my billing cycle to see if the charges actually were there. Sure enough, they were. I was almost in disbelief.

This is fraud, plain and simple. I called AT&T to dispute the charge and they did refund the money and put a block on my line for future charges.

But still as many have pointed out -- what of the many other people who do not notice the charge? It's clear to me that AT&T is to blame for allowing these companies a way to bill their customers and not policing them -- in this case the AT&T customer service rep admitted to knowing about cramming and how big a problem it is, even with this specific service. So other people have called about it and reported abuse, yet they have done nothing to ban the company. The burden here is clearly on the part of AT&T for letting these companies continue to bill people when they are implicitly aware of the fraud.

There really needs to be a big law firm that gets behind this and starts some class action litigation against the carriers. That seems to be the only way problems actually get fixed these days.