This has happened to me as well. A few months ago. The message hit me twice at 9.99 a pop. This also was the first time I'd ever heard of this. I called Verizon's customer no-service number. They were of no service. I was told that Verizon could do nothing to stop this fraud. I was told that I had to cancel the service and request a refund from the company. The company is: sms4gamecheats.com. Their toll free number is: 877 244 7035. Feel free to spam them. They are criminals and Verizon makes it possible for them to prey on Verizon customers.
I called the toll free number and they promised to refund the charges. They are liars and frauds. Verizon facilitates this by doing NOTHING to prevent it and then doing NOTHING to provide a remedy. Verizon does not care about customers if this is the way they provide service.
I had the premium service blocked. Today I have received numerous more attempts to access my premium text messaging. I have no doubt that if I hadn't had it blocked, I would have been charged for each attempt and Verizon would merely shrug. My contract expires in a little more than a month. Verizon is about to say goodbye to my family and all of my business lines. It is the only way I have to send a message.
as a last note, not only can vzw reps tell you where the charges are coming from, it can be verified whether or not it was initiated via text message or not.
A lot of these services are initiated via a website. (stupid Facebook) Watch anything online that pops up and wants you to enter your mobile # in order to verify results for something... it happens all the time, one of the common ones is an IQ test
In reply to Spanky, I just called my VZW rep and they pretty much repeated the stuff I already knew from the text message that was used to steal my money. Again, I explained that Verizon is acting as the middleman for crooks by TAKING my money and giving it to a crooked business. And then Verizon is shrugging as if they are clueless. I asked the rep for the identity of the crooks. She merely repeated that it was sms4gamecheats.com and that the toll free number was the same one that I already had. She had no idea what the mailing address was or anything else that would allow me to pay them a visit.
Customer no-service has lived up to its reputation again.
In case there's someone from clueless land (aka Verizon), I've managed to find out that the owner of the domain for sms4gamecheats.com is:
Narnin Aleksej
Email: games@mail.ru
Organization: Private person
Address: nopli 18.1
City: Narva
State: narva
ZIP: 10475
Country: EE
Phone: +372.56676899
It took me about 10 minutes of casual looking. So Verizon is facilitating some crook in Narva, Estonia by acting as his bagman for some internet fraud. Nice.
I have some suggestions on how to solve this situation if any of you clueless Verizon people are reading this.
malevolence wrote:In reply to Spanky, I just called my VZW rep and they pretty much repeated the stuff I already knew from the text message that was used to steal my money. Again, I explained that Verizon is acting as the middleman for crooks by TAKING my money and giving it to a crooked business. And then Verizon is shrugging as if they are clueless. I asked the rep for the identity of the crooks. She merely repeated that it was sms4gamecheats.com and that the toll free number was the same one that I already had. She had no idea what the mailing address was or anything else that would allow me to pay them a visit.
Customer no-service has lived up to its reputation again.
The only info that can be provided about premium sms companies by customer service is name of premium alerts, what they send, 800#, contact email (if available), 5-digit short code and opt out procedures. Premium sms services are third party so VzW doesn't have access to all info about that company.
Mamatrueby,
It IS a scam. You have been robbed. Anyone can put ANY cell phone number into one of those scam websites and the service provider will TAKE your money and you can't do anything about it except beg for a refund. Verizon is only one of many service providers who facilitate this kind of theft. The only way you can avoid it is to have the premium messaging service blocked.
The same thing happend to me. I didn't even know there WAS such a thing as premium messaging service. Like you, I sure didn't know that someone could steal money by charging my account and I sure didn't know that Verizon would help them do it.
Like you, when I called customer no-sevice, I was told almost nothing useful. I was informed that Verizon can do nothing to stop this predatory business model (liars) and that the only recourse I had was to call the crooks to demand a refund, LOL. Verizon told me they had no way to address the problem other than to block the premium messaging service.
OK, it's blocked. I called the crooks and they promised a refund. That was in January. I'm still waiting. And I'm still angry as hell.
My advice is to make sure the premium messaging service is blocked and then make a sport of pestering Verizon about this problem. They take the attitude that they have no responsibility and until they feel some pain they will never change.
I used to spam the crooks with repeated calls to their toll free number. I have learned that they will block these attempts after a while so I have to use different phone lines from time to time. I am becoming adept at understanding people who speak with an Indian accent. Cheers.
Mamatrueby,
I'm glad Verizon said they'd credit your account. I suspect that they actually will do that. They have told me that they would note my request for a refund but no action yet.
The problem is that giving us a refund is not a solution and they know it. The solution is that WE should have to opt into services like this with informed consent. As it is, until we are victims of theft, many of us don't even know we have the service, much less use it. It just lies there like time bomb waiting for some internet scam artist to tell Verizon to give them some of our money. I suspect that Verizon derives some revenue from this and even if they don't, the losses of refunding a small fraction of victim's money will be passed on through fees or higher rates.
{keep it relevant}
I'm just hoping that sometime one of these crooks will show up on this side of the pond. I'd like to have a nice chat.
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