The Federal Trade Commission ordered AT&T to pay refunds to customers that were affected by this unethical practice to the tune of 88 million dollars. The refunds stem from the practice where two companies Tatto and Acquinity charged customers without their consent for joke text messages, ringtones, horoscopes, love tips, etc.
This unethical practice is still in use today except it takes the form of unethical apps that make it extremely difficult to cancel an ongoing service that might have been unwittingly signed up for. One of my co-workers dealt with this app issue last week in fact when his daughter got an app and made an account for it and wound up signing up for a weekly charge service without knowing it. It was almost impossible to cancel the service and he had to make several dead end phone calls and finally found a way online to cancel it when he found a complaint message board with people that had the same thing happen to them.
AT&T allowed this to happen to it's customers in 2014 and paid the price for it in the form of refunds to the consumers as bill credits which averaged $31.00 each. An ethical marketer should have to have permission or an opt in list for consumers to be marketed to rather than phishing for customer information to sign them up and sell their data to other marketers.
FTC
Providing Over $88 Million in Refunds to AT&T Customers Who Were
Subjected to Mobile Cramming. (2017, September 26). Retrieved December
7, 2018, from
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2016/12/ftc-providing-over-88-million-refunds-att-customers-who-were
