Be really careful with those. I recently had to deal with a scam on Karen’s phone. Apparently AT&T has made it super-easy for 3rd party “providers” to send you a text message, and if you reply AT ALL, that’s all AT&T can see in their system. The 3rd party company then uses the convenient “upload an XML file full of phone numbers and any arbitrary price we desire to extract from said phone users” file to AT&T for AT&T to handle the billing. When you call to contest this $19.99 monthly “subscription” that shows up on your AT&T cell phone bill, they say, “Well, we see you exchanged text messages with the company in our system. You must have accepted an offer from them.” Only after an hour of explaining that my wife was NOT that stupid and NEVER replied to any message that said “will you sign up?”… did they offer to refund the charges and set up “Parental Controls” (HA!) on both of our accounts so NO 3rd party could ever bill anything on them. I highly recommend to all on AT&T.

So seriously, some company could send you this message “Hey, what you doing tonight?” from a number you don’t recognize, and you could send back, “Who is this?” and AT&T would see that as “proof” that you had a business relationship with them. When I pointed this out to an AT&T supervisor they said, “I suppose that could happen — we are getting a ot of complaints right now. However I’ve refunded the fees this month.” … Okay lady, how do I stop it FOREVER, and why are you making it easier for unknown third parties to bill me, your customer, than it is for me to opt-out of such shenanigans? Oh by the way, I will be reporting this to our State Attorney General since it’s generally considered bad business to bill for another party whom you can’t prove has a business relationship of any kind with your customer. You yourselves say you can’t see the text messages for privacy reasons… so how do you know EVERY one of the bills you’re sending out isn’t a scam such as I described?

She was like a deer in headlights, and started reading from the script again. After about four attempts I said, “What would you say if this were my 12 year old’s phone?” “Oh, we have Parental Controls for that!” Well, there ya go lady… fire me up some “Parental Controls” on both lines, please… my wife’s and mine. “But you won’t be able to order any other services!” “That’s absolutely correct, and I can’t see us ever NEEDING those other services either, but my wife did enjoy a few of the Trivia questions she received once a month from these idiots.” That was pretty much the end of the conversation at that point. 30-45 minutes of my life wasted, stopping my cell carrier for billing me for other people’s scam businesses.

AT&T *did* do the “right thing” and refund it, but there were clueless about why I was upset about it. I finally got down to asking everyone I talked to there: “Please prove I have a business relationship with XYZ third party company, which allows you to bill me for their services.” They were dumbfounded. There was nothing on their (so called) customer service scripts to handle someone asking such a “tough” question.