3 ms·
It is unbelievable that this is not illegal.
by locopati 15y ago
It is unbelievable that this is not illegal.
- techsupporter 15y agoCramming is illegal but there are two reasons why enforcement is lax: First, as the article points out (and attempts, by inference, to get the carriers to convict themselves of), the billing carrier earns a cut, usually in the 20-30% range. Second, the individual amounts are usually quite small so it's not "worth" anyone's time to actually investigate unless that person is the subscriber who got dinged. Simply shutting off third-party billing would kill off all kinds of pretty revenue streams that U.S. mobile and wireline carriers just love, such as purchasing apps from the Android and Windows Phone marketplaces without a credit card and "accidentally" (or intentionally, since they are somewhat popular) signing up for premium services via SMS.
- guard-of-terra 15y agoYou can separate legitimate payments from fraud. It's not even hard. But surely they, earning a cut, don't even want that.
- felipemnoa 15y agoI guess the easy targets are the phone companies themselves for facilitating/enabling the fraud. They should probably be the ones getting sued.
- nisse72 15y agoI agree completely. In Sweden "everybody" knows the practice of negative option marketing (or billing) is illegal, and it surprises me after a few minutes of googling that that doesn't seem to be the case in most of US and Canada.
- dedward 15y agobelieve its true in canada as well..... automatically signing anyone up for something they didnt agree to is generally outright fraud............