Now on Your Cellphone Bill, Services You Never Wanted

For years, phone carriers have wanted to find ways to make it easy for mobile customers to buy things and charge them to their phone bills. That has legitimate uses, like buying ringtones and apps, or even making political donations or financial pledges to a nonprofit radio station. But it is easily abused, in ways not always easy to spot: Consumers, for instance, could start getting text messages about sports scores or horoscopes for which they never wanted to sign up.

As with 900 numbers, it’s ripe with potential for abuse, and in some cases that potential has become reality,” said Jan Dawson, an independent telecom analyst for Jackdaw Research.

Such practices recently returned to the spotlight when the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit accusing T-Mobile USA of profiting from “cramming” -- the tacking on of unauthorized charges that appear, often without a coherent explanation, on customers’ bills.

The practice of cramming is common on bills for traditional phone lines, but only recently began to appear on bills for mobile phone usage. Regulators say that in the context of cellphones, cramming typically occurs when a user is browsing the web with a smartphone, encounters an advertisement and inadvertently agrees to something. The phone number then subscribes to a text-message service, which delivers texts on topics like celebrity gossip, dating and the weather for a monthly fee that is usually around $9.

Despite those consumer protections, some companies still manage to drop in those extra charges on unwitting consumers. Since 2010, the Federal Communications Commission has taken nine anti-cramming enforcement actions against companies and proposed more than $33 million in fines. That is much less than 1 percent of the amount consumers may have lost to cramming charges in the same period.