ESBI, aka Enhanced Services Billing, passed a charge along to my phone company, EMBARQ. The charge was identified as "Residential Email Mo Fee". They apparently had my wife's email address and DOB. After checking with my wife and confirming that she knew nothing about this service, I called again to have them issue a credit for $15.96 (14.95/mo plus 1.01 tax). ESBI indicated that they would send an email confirmation, which they did. It came across from "Residential Email [[email protected]]", along with a lengthy series of "pleased-be-advised" statements" and how it may take 1-2 billing cycles to have the credit resolved. I also checked out the residentialemail website, which is chock full of disclosure stuff. My wife would never have signed up for this, and certainly didn't.
From the length and detail of the confirmation email, I got the impression that they send out a lot of them. My suspicion is that they get this personal info some way, sign you up, and bill you, hoping that you don't check your bill too closely. Auto-draft phone bills might not be inspected at all. They play the float on your money until you catch them. Very shady. I further contacted EMBARQ and requested that they put a block on all 3rd party billing on our phone account.
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