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player ready...Federal regulators are seeking $52.6 million from a Texas-based billing company that they allege loaded more than $70 million in bogus charges on consumers’ phone bills.
The Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday it has asked a federal court to issue a civil contempt ruling against Billing Services Group, the nation’s largest third-party billing company, and order it to repay the unauthorized charges that it failed to refund.
According to the FTC, Billing Services added charges for unauthorized services like voicemail, identity-theft prevention services and streaming video to bills of nearly 1.2 million phone lines between 2006 and 2010. The practice, known as “cramming,” grew in prevalence as more Americans began carrying cellular phones in the early 2000s.
Regulators said a Billing Services subsidiary charged consumers for voicemail services without their consent, resulting in “voluminous consumer complaints” and “astronomical refund rates.” Further, the FTC asserted, very few of the consumers who were billed for the services ever used them. In one case, the company billed more than 250,000 consumers for a streaming video service, but only 23 movies were streamed, the agency said.
The FTC said the company violated in 1999 settlement with the agency that prohibited unauthorized billing, misrepresentations to consumers and providing billing services to vendors “who fail to clearly disclose the terms of their services.”
Billing Services disputed the FTC’s claims, saying in a statement that the agency draws false conclusions and presented an “incomplete and inaccurate representation of the facts.”
“The bottom line is that the FTC is trying to blame BSG for the acts of another party,” the company said in a statement.
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