There is a charge on my AT&T bill for something I never signed up for. Is this a known scam?

On October 8, 2014, the FTC, the FCC, and the attorneys general of all 50 states and the District of Columbia announced a joint $105 million settlement with AT&T Mobility over "mobile cramming" — placing charges for third-party subscription services on customers' phone bills that those customers never ordered and never used. The charges were typically billed at $9.99 a month for things like horoscopes, trivia, flirting tips, and celebrity gossip texts, often appearing on the bill as a vague line item that gave no real indication of what it was for or how to stop it. AT&T kept 35% of each charge and passed the rest to the company sending the "service." The settlement required AT&T to pay $80 million into a fund administered by the FTC to refund affected customers, $20 million to the states, and $5 million to the FCC, and barred AT&T from billing for these third-party charges without a customer's express, verifiable consent.

This was not an isolated case — the same year, T-Mobile separately settled near-identical mobile cramming allegations with the FTC and FCC for $90 million, after an investigation found it billed customers for the same kind of unrequested $9.99/month premium text subscriptions and kept 35-40% of each charge itself. Both settlements establish the same thing: a major US carrier knowingly let unauthorized third-party charges ride on customer bills for years, and regulators concluded the carrier itself, not just the third party, was responsible for failing to prevent and disclose it.

If you see a charge on your bill you don't recognize, ask your carrier in writing to identify exactly which company placed it and under what authorization — a charge with no clear answer to that question is the same pattern regulators have already acted on twice. Carriers are now required to let customers block all third-party charges on request, and FCC truth-in-billing rules require any charge to be described clearly enough that a customer can tell what it is for. Dispute the charge in writing, ask for a refund of the full billing history of that line item (not just the latest month), and request third-party billing be blocked on your account going forward. If the carrier won't resolve it, an FCC complaint is free and requires a written response within 30 days; your state attorney general's consumer protection office can also act on it.