Price for 'premium' text messages? $10,000

by Christopher Byrne | October 30, 2007 at 12:05 pm

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Athens, GA (Oct 30, 2007) - I hate texting. Why text when you can just call the person and talk? In the article below from MSNBC's "Red tape Chronicles", you can read how a father found his own reason to hate texting. When it comes to Sprint PCS, customers (and I am one of them) can get very frustrated because there does not seem to be any apparent way to disable texting on phone accounts.

Sean Clark pays extra each month for his cell phone service so his daughter Amanda can enjoy unlimited, no-charge text messaging. So the Bothell, Wash. man was stunned when his Sprint bill for September showed with nearly $10,000 in text message charges.

"When I opened the bill, it was just pure shock," he said. "There were pages and pages and pages of things on there."

He called Sprint immediately looking for an explanation. Clark knew ringtones and Web-based downloads could get expensive, so he had turned off Web access from Amanda's phone. He also knew that Amanda, a developmentally disabled 18-year-old, liked to send text messages so he "protected himself" by signing up for unlimited messaging. The bill for his family plan was normally a couple of hundred dollars per month.

Initially, a Sprint customer service agent agreed with Clark’s guess that he was a victim of fraud. But a bit of research revealed that he was instead the victim third-party providers who offer services on Sprint's network. And he quickly learned that not all text messages are equal.

Amanda had signed up for a series of so-called "premium" text message services. Premium texts cost typically $1-$2 each and are not covered by monthly bundling plans.

It's hard to imagine one teenager running up $10,000 in text charges in a month -- until you consider the services she used. Amanda had signed up for text-chatting services, lured by ads promising romantic dialogs with "cool guys." With each message costing $1-$2 a pop, such chats can easily cost hundreds of dollars a day.