Now the second-biggest U.S. carrier has to pay a huge bill for AT&T bogus data charges. The company will have to pay $105 million settlement because of all the extra AT&T bogus charges that users suffered from.
AT&T placed extra charges for its data plans on its subscribers’ phone bills. Such statements were made by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, attorneys and Federal Communications Commission. This week isn’t the best time for the American carrier. It first had an employee who illegally obtained and accessed personal accounts of the mobile company’s customers and had to warn users about the internal data breach.
Did AT&T extra charge your phone bill? You are covered up by several U.S. commissions that announced on October 8, 2014 that the carrier earned bunch of money using “mobile cramming” system. This is when different companies share charges for fun facts, horoscopes and other entertaining SMS.
According to the Commissions, AT&T knew about such programs and actually participated in this by adding extra charges to its subscribers’ phone bills. It totally got about 35% royalty on such bogus charges. Now the carrier has to pay $80 million so that the government agency can develop a reimbursement program for users who were affected by such charges.
The FCC will get $5 million and individual U.S. states will collect $20 million. This is not the first time the FTC files such expensive complaints against the American carriers. Earlier in 2014 T-Mobile was accused of similar mobile cramming.