SMS spam on your cell phone is annoying enough as it is. Imagine how much more annoying it is to discover that some of the text messages you ignored may have been sneakwrap-type notices of charges for a service you didn't sign up to receive. That's what happened to one reader recently with an outfit called Dadamobile.
"I recently found a charge on my Cingular cellular phone bill for $9.99," the reader wrote. "The line item on the bill was for e-wallet services and the company referenced was Mblox.com. I sent an e-mail to Mblox and received a response stating that they were simply a middleman and that the charge came for a company called Dadamobile.com. I had never heard of the company. My next e-mail went to Dadamobile."
In response, the reader received an e-mail from Dadamobile claiming his cell phone had been subscribed to their service a few months earlier, and they had started charging the $9.99 monthly fee only after his one-week free trial had passed without a cancellation from him. The act of subscribing "was done by visiting our website, inserting your phone number and ticking a box to state you had read the terms and conditions," the e-mail from the DADAmobile Customer Care Team read. "We have done a check in our database, but we did not find any requests to stop the service before the end of the free week. Afterwords (sic) you received several sms on your mobile which reminded you of the conditions of subscription and how to discontinue it:
'Need new hot content 4 ur mob? Check www.dadamobile.com or txt LIST to 63232.U have 40 downloads for $9.99/month only. 2 cancel txt STOP.Help?info@dadamobile.com.'"
Gee, that certainly strikes me as much a binding contract as some of the things our courts have upheld in recent years. Anyway, Dadamobile said it would now cease charging the reader, but that it didn't matter whether he personally had intentionally signed up or not. "Unfortunately Dadamobile can not take responsibility for the circumstances in which you subscribed, be accidental or not (sic)," the e-mail said.
The reader knows for certain that he didn't sign up at Dadamobile's website, accidentally or not, but it sounds like it doesn't matter to Datamobile if someone else did so with his cell phone number. "In other words, you get to go to the Dadamobile site, type in a cell phone number, and if the person didn't get the cancel SMS messages or just ignored them, they would be charged for the service," the reader wrote. "I did not subscribe to this service, and I have never visited their website. I am in the process of having Cingular reverse the e-wallet charges. The $9.99 isn't a large amount of money, but the way Dadamobile does business ticks me off. If I would not have noticed it right away, who knows how long they would have continued to charge my account?"
The reader doesn't remember seeing the SMS messages that Dadamobile claims it sent him, but he says it's possible he just ignored it as spam. "To be honest, I may have gotten the messages," he wrote. "But since I don't typically use SMS, I would probably just have deleted them. I did send them a follow-up e-mail suggesting that their business practices aren't very good, but they didn't respond to that one."
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