AT&T has always given a great service with some complaining of bad service, but in my years of working with phones and companies the company has always delivered. This is why it was a shock to find our about a new settlement.

The latest scoop is that AT&T customers were seeing mysterious charges for ringtones plus other content which showed up on their bills, customers will be able to claim refunds as part of the settlement of a group of class-action lawsuits. They can claim for refunds for those charges that appeared on up to 3 of their bills between January 1st 2004 and May 30th 2008 according to lead counsel for the plaintiffs Jay Edelson.

This indeed is the first ever nationwide settlement over the company of third party content, AT&T spokesman Marty Richter said he knew of no other similar settlement, Edelson said.

Similar suits were filed against Sprint Nextel Corp, T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless; these suits were filed by the Edelson’s firm. Vendors of ringtones and daily text-message services with the likes of horoscopes and jokes, solicit customers to sign up by entering their phone numbers on Websites or by sending text messages. The charges, which can be hidden or poorly explained, will then show up later on cell-phone bills, often as recurring charges. This is when the cell-phone carrier keeps some of the fee and then passes the rest to the content provider. There were 16 class action suits that were part of the settlement and was alleged that AT&T should have been more careful in vetting the services, obviously AT&T did not admit to doing anything wrong. They do however want to fix this problem.

Why wasn’t AT&T more careful?

Source — Phone Scoop

http://www.phonescoop.com/news/item.php?n=3068