I just called AT&T about these charges. He refunded the $10.67 I was charged, and cancelled the subscription.
He told me that the charge was added by Verisign – confirming my googled knowledge that Jamster is at least partially owned by Verisign. So… yet another reason to dislike Verisign.
He also added a purchase control thingy to AT&T’s MediaNET to prevent anyone from charging my phone line again without my explicit approval.
I asked why that wasn’t the default – they should automatically verify that you want these kinds of things. His answer? “By law we have to allow people to buy things on their phone.”
Guess what? Verification does not in any way negate the ability to buy things on one’s phone. It was an idiotic excuse, but I didn’t want to yell at him. After all, there wasn’t anything this particular customer service agent could do about it.
Let me be clear, though: enabling verification by default would resolve the most glaring problems with the system, and if they do that I’ll be satisfied.
So anyway I asked who I can talk to about getting AT&T to stop this sort of thing from happening on a scale larger than “we’ll refund things for whoever happens to notice and complain”. At first he said “we have no department for that”, but after I pressed him on the issue (there must be someone I could talk to) he directed me to the “Contact Us” section of AT&T Wireless’ website.
So off I go:
…
…
… HULK SMASH THINGS.
Looks like my next course of action is to track down some fraud department number on my own, or failing that, find a VP’s (or CEO’s) phone number and leave a message for them.
I guess I can understand why the default wouldn’t be to require verification, but why didn’t they offer to make your account buy things with verification only after the first time you called? or the second? If this kind of scam is widespread setting up a purchase control should be straightforward.
When I called about this in 2008, they told me that my only option was to turn off data access entirely – which also turns off picture messaging.
Since we wanted picture messaging (we were paying for it after all) I didn’t want to turn off data access, which meant I didn’t have a way to prevent it from happening.
If they offered this “verified purchase” system back then, they didn’t mention it.
I’ve run into similar situations, but I luckily found all the charges the month they were applied to my bill (so far two subscriptions on my line, but my wife’s also been receiving spam—I told her to simply never reply, and just delete the messages.
I replied STOP, which seems to be the trigger word for START, because I seem to get the charges, and she does not 🙁
Anyways, I wrote up my experience (so far) here: http://www.lifeisaprayer.com/blog/2012/mobile-phone-sms-spam-can-be
I wish there was some way I could help get those shortcodes shut down.