Annoyance phone calls

[Bob Orts]

quote:

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Originally posted by PaulW

Is that true, Bob? How can someone who calls you charge you for the call? Seems highly unlikely.

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It’s called Third Party Billing and it’s not limited to only services initiated over the telephone. Technically, a restaurant can offer you the option of paying the check by charging your telephone bill, or paying your groceries by billing your telephone.

It is not common practice any longer because fraud, deceptive billing, and time based transactions now accounts for 95% of all third parties billing. To the legitimate business, billing third party on a phone number is risky and is no longer as common as it was many years ago.

You may have heard about this through the more common known terminology of “Cramming” Cramming is the practice of sticking charges on a phone bill that are illegal or fraudulent. Cramming is still so successful because the law makes it difficult to prosecute, even more difficult for a telephone company to refuse, and still harder for the average consumer to notice these false charges. It’s estimated that as many a 5,000,000 cramming incidents occur each month.

Why this is such a problem, and, as we see here unknown to many, is the charges are no longer just $25 a minute for calls to some sex line, or $15 for custome voice mail message recording, they now have become sophisticated hidden charges such as “Line Access Surcharge $0.75” or you may see “Long Distance Wire Recovery –annual- $0.50”. A $25 dollar added charge to your bill will draw your attention, but a fifty cents charge on your bill may go unnoticed. Times that by 5,000,000 with half paying and not disputing it, that company just crammed and was paid over one million dollars that month for nothing but sending a computer disc to the phone company.

The good news is the FCC has moved to require that all third party billing must now be identified as such with a notice that it is a third party billing and not regular telephone billing charges.

quote:

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Originally posted by pog

Bob, how to determine if actual human picked up vs. dog nosing the phone off the hook or even @ 2:01 long answering machine message ?

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So long as it goes over the 2 minute mark required by law before billing can occur, it doesn’t matter if you were on the phone, your dog, the answering machine, or anything else. It’s based only on the actual length of the call from when it picked up to disconnect.

However nobody has anything to worry about if they have a third party billing block on their phone numbers.