I know this isn’t about writing or reading or even about Hairy Beast:
(Anything is cute with wacky music.)
But we found something on our phone bill today that makes me want to rent one of those trucks with the speakers and drive down the street ranting like a crazy person.
There’s this thing called “Premium Messaging“. Third parties can bill your phone without your knowledge. This can come from those spam texters, some Facebook contest/survey thingie or a website from your laptop.
My daughter and I watched a video online, on our laptops, that we were led to believe was free. LO AND BEHOLD we were charged $10.00 on our phone bill for it! Scary part? I didn’t give them my phone number.
How did they do that?
ANYWAY.
We called Verizon and they graciously took the charges off. GO VERIZON!
You can have PREMIUM MESSAGING capability turned off on your phone, so no third-party charges can ever be put on your phone bill. That, we have done. Because it’s really easy to miss those extra charges in a long and complicated bill with multiple phones.
You may want to do that yourself.
Yikes!
I KNOW. You’d think people would care about this thing.
Holy wow, that is creepy. I’m glad Verizon took it off, and also glad my monthly bill is super consistent so I’ll know instantly if something like this hits! (Thanks for letting me know where to look.)
Everything is a game of ‘Gotcha!’.
Money makes the vorld go around, the vorld go around, the vorld go around…(channeling Joel Grey, girls.)
I just told my two kids. Thanks for the heads-up, had never heard of this.
Sheila, consumers have to stick together!