Well, it’s rare to see me in the Pit, but this one got me good. I’m a rare breed that refuses to purchase the “$5 for 300 text messages” deal, as I text only in emergencies, when calling will not work. So I suck it up and pay 20 cents/text. As long as I send less than 25 a month (I’m at maybe 10/month), I win out.
Fast forward to me making the mistake of telling a friend I pay per text. He - knowing how conservative I am with money - thinks it’s funny to text me randomly to intentionally charge me money. Tonight he sent 10 in a row. Regardless of how childish this is, it opened my eyes to a bigger problem - how can a cell phone company legally charge me for something I have zero control over? I called Sprint to ask if I could have the charges reimbursed, and they said no deal. If I don’t want to pick up a phone call, I don’t and do not get billed, but even if I refuse to open a text message, the fact that it was delivered to my account means I owe 20 cents! Yes, I can block numbers or shut down texting, but I shouldn’t have to give up my services because others abuse them.
How can this even be legal? Even if I purchased the “300 messages”, someone could still theoretically send me 10,000 messages and force me to pay $2000 to my phone company. It’s a system that is ripe for abuse. Where did I sign agreeing to this? In fact I didn’t, as I have been out of contract for 3 years, and the original contract I was on was from about 2002 which probably didn’t even mention text messaging. I’ll be calling Sprint’s corporate office on Monday, although I doubt it will do any good. It might be time to move on even though all companies I’ve checked have this policy.
I think what gets me the most is that delivering a text message from one phone to another has to use the equivalent of about 1 second of airtime on a phone. They just see it as a cash cow and take advantage of their users…to get back at them I think I’ll just call my wife’s phone up (free calling to one another) and leave them connected to one another all night long.
This seems like the makings of a class-action lawsuit…
You would think it would be illegal, but, I’m thinkin that if the company offers to block txt messages there’s not much to stand on. Basically, you’re looking at sending your friend the portion of the bill. Look at it this way - you get charged everytime you get a call, even if you dont want to talk to the person. It may or may not fall in the free minute pool. If you dont answer the call and it goes to voicemail, chances are you are charged to check your vm regardless if you wanted that person to leave you a message.
What it boils down to is:
It’s not the company’s responsibility to know what messages you want, and from whom. This is why most phones have the blocking ability and most companies also have a blocking ability. It is your responsibility to have the talk with your friend and tell them - hey, I have no choice but to block you on my cellphone because you’re abusing my boundaries (emergency text only). Tell them when they are able to show some respect, you’ll reconsider.
Somehow I imagine that Sprint has it covered in their terms and conditions, which do indicate that they can change them without notice. Even if you are out of contract, I would think that just means that your contract is month to month until you terminate it. Of course, I’m not an attorney.
The only way that I can see they can do what you’re wanting is to let you see who the text message is from, and let you decide whether to accept or not. I’m not sure if that’s something that could be easily done.
Makes me glad that the cell phone service providers in South Korea don’t charge anything at all for incoming texts or calls. What we have here instead is something Koreans call Spam call (that’s actually how it’s pronounced in Korean, too). That’s like a telemarketing call from the Devil himself, the way those get charged.
Sprint is also notoriously bad for sending text messages to you and charging you for them, too. My wife has to call them every month to complain about that. It was not so bad when they would issue a $5 credit each time they promised to block the text messaging and then didn’t ever follow through. Now, they just credit the text message amount and promise to block (again, never following through). Only 1 month left on that contract and then we are Sprint-free.
I’d Suggest closing your account, but make sure as many people are aware of this practice as is possible.
They don’t do this in the UK, unless you actively give permission, and folk are often conned into doing this with very misleading spam texts.
Oh, and punch your ‘friend’ in the face good and proper too, what a fucking twat, seems to me to be of the arsehole type and when you demand your money back from them, I’m sure that the comments will be something like ‘What’s the big deal over 20c’
Punch this friend again very hard in the face - sometimes its the only way.
Even better is if you figure it out as the amount you’re paying per unit of data. An SMS is at most 160 bytes, meaning at $0.20 each you’re paying around one thousand, three hundred and ten dollars per megabyte. And that’s the best case scenario; send a message that says “Hi Steve, fancy a pint?” and you’re paying over $9,000 per megabyte. And since the recipient pays, too, the phone company makes $18,000 per megabyte on messages of that length. Cool, eh?
Given that, it’s no wonder Steve Jobs chose not to implement a proper IM client on the iPhone, preferring instead to use SMS at fifteen cents a pop. The phone companies in the UK absolutely minted it off text messaging until the regulators started to make threatening noises, and the US operators want some of that action.
The UK texting & mobile scandal was slightly differant.
BT was heavily advertising texting and phototexting for those on holiday abroad.
The result was that the user had to pay for three international calls, which was hugely expensive, but this was not made clear in the promotion, in fact it wasn’t mentioned at all.
This led to examination of other charging practices and this is when the regulator stepped in.
Ditto for Japan, only outgoing calls and messages are charged. The scum here used to do what were called “wangiri” calls: one ring and then hang up. Since you didn’t answer, they don’t get charged, but their number is now in your phone memory. They make money off the people who call back to see who called them.
Yep, that’s the “Spaym ka-roo” here. And it’s not exactly a cheap phone call. Imagine a one-nine million call, if you will. [Mork]That’s like a 1-900 call but ten thousand times worse.[/Mork]
Almost everyone I know, Korean or foreigner, here tells me, “Make sure you tell me who you are in the first word of the message the first time you send me SMS. Otherwise, I’m blocking it as a spam call.”
I really don’t understand it. The general public is pretty peeved at those calls yet the government does nothing about it.
This I don’t understand. Even in our piece of rock the telephone companies (one of which was Verizon, until recently) figured it would be better to drop the practice of charging for incoming calls. As a result there are more phones in the Dominican Rep. than there are people and they are making a killing.
Charging for incoming calls is stupid AND doesn’t make business sense in the long run (judging by the experience here). Heck, we don’t even pay to pick up our messages.
As far as I can tell, the Japanese gov’t either made it illegal or really cracked down on whatever existing regulation was being violating, because I haven’t gotten any in several years.
