October 8, 2014

By Joshua Brunstein

AT&T (T) has agreed (click here) to a $105 million settlement with federal agencies and state attorneys general for allowing companies to add fraudulent charges to its customers phone bills—and taking at least a 35 percent cut of what they made.

This process, known as cramming, has been around in various forms since the 1990s, and carriers have sworn numerous times to put an end to it. In total, customers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on charges they never asked for, officials said in a press conference Wednesday. The Federal Communications Commission has taken 14 enforcement actions on cramming since 2010, covering $122 million in activity. The AT&T case is the largest such settlement in the agency’s history, according to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler....