I'd like to add 1 more name to the "victims" of Solo Communications, my son William. He lives in Calif. And has a limited income, so I pay his AT&T bill from my bank account in Colorado. While calling AT&T about a different matter, I was alerted to several charges on my son's account, one of which was from Solo Communications, and was billed through Enhanced Services Billing. I understand that this is a 3rd party billing company. He did not order any services from Solo Communications.
I tried reaching Enhanced Services Billing through an "800" number given me by AT&T. I was told that they could not cancel the account and did not have any number for me to reach Solo Communications. Wait a minute! This company does the billing for another company that they don't even have a phone number for? Sounds fishy to me. I was able to reach Solo Communications only through the number given on consumer complaints website. This number got me to something called ESBI, (Is this Enhanced Services Billing?) and I did get a transfer to Solo, which cancelled the service.
Like "notbrittneytayor" I was suspicious by how quickly they were willing to cancel the account, with almost no questions asked. My son's AT&T bill had 3 other charges for E-mail and voice mail services, none of which was ordered by him. Once I finally got through the 3rd party billing companies, which was a long ordeal, I was able to reach the companies actually involved and was again surprised to find how willing they were to cancel the service.
It seems to me that the 3rd party billing compaies are as much at fault as companies like Solo Communications. They make it so difficult to get to the actual campany billing your phone service provider, that many people probably give up and just accept the new "Service" they don't remember signing up for.
How do people get signed up for these services? AT&T told me that many times a pop-up offer to"register for a free laptop" or some other offer, will get people to enter their E-mail, name and phone service provider. Unfortunately they don't read the fine print and don't realize that they've signed up for a monthly service. This is probably perfectly legal, but it smells like a scam to me.
So are people like my son just chumps who should have known better? Maybe and maybe not! Think about it. Anyone can get a whole list of strangers' E-mails and names just by going on MYSpace, Facebook or dozens of other sites. This means that anyone could could use anyone else's name and E-mail on these "freebie" sites and an unsuspecting person gets charged for a service they never ordered.
Thanks for letting me vent! Maybe my son's experience will help someone else avoid a ripoff like this.
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