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"  Cellular bills are confusing, to be sure, but when something is egregiously wrong, it stands out. That&amp;#039;s what happened when I got the first bill from Cingular for my BlackBerry service. In addition to the service charges and taxes and random excise surcharges and other assorted pork stuffed into my invoice, I found $72 assessed for 87 received SMS text messages, all billed by a Watertown, Mass., merchant named m-Qube, Inc. Thing is, I&amp;#039;ve never used text messaging on my Blackberry. My first thought: I&amp;#039;ve been spammed\u2014and billed for the courtesy. The hairs of injustice on the back of my neck pricked up. I knew darned well that the FCC has already made it perfectly clear in 2004 that spam on cell phones is illegal.  First, I called Cingular to inquire about the charges, and the company quickly blocked all text messages to my BlackBerry and credited my account for the spurious charges. Then I tracked down the publicist for m-Cube, who gave an impassioned defense of his company&amp;#039;s role in the affair. &amp;quot;This wasn&amp;#039;t us,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;We don&amp;#039;t sell any services directly to the customer. Our company acts as a middleman to help mobile content providers to bill cellular service providers [such as Cingular].&amp;quot;  Further research proved him right: The charges were actually coming from a multimedia and text-messaging company out of San Diego, Calif., called SMS.ac. A call to the company quickly identified the problem. Apparently, I wasn&amp;#039;t a victim of spam after all\u2014it was my phone number that was the victim. When I signed up for service, my BlackBerry was assigned a recycled number\u2014one that had previously belonged to another customer. Sometimes, I was told, when a customer cancels his or her account, data services from third party content providers aren&amp;#039;t automatically cancelled and the charges appear on the bill of the next person to receive the number.  So who, in this twisted chain of service providers, is responsible for cancelling data services? I asked Greg Wilfahrt, executive Vice President and co-founder of SMS.ac., who acknowledged that there were no clear-cut rules about it. &amp;quot;In a nascent business such as ours,&amp;quot; Wilfahrt says, &amp;quot;there are still some issues to be worked out and this is clearly one of them. But the consumer doesn&amp;#039;t care whose fault it was, they just want to be taken care of. Our position is that we&amp;#039;ll make ourselves accountable.&amp;quot;  True to his word, Wilfahrt went through the records attached to my BlackBerry&amp;#039;s phone number and cancelled the account and erased the charges (which had already been erased by Cingular, but it was nice to see Greg make sure of it). Nevertheless, the experience left me a little stunned at some major accountability gaps in the cellular service chain. There are plenty of third-party services that are charged through customers&amp;#039; cell phone bills, and when cellular providers cancel a user&amp;#039;s number, that doesn&amp;#039;t necessarily cancel everything associated with it. Second, the payment structure for text messages is flawed. Recipients of text messages incur charges\u2014just as senders do, a double jeapordy that leaves the receiver vulnerable to an unwanted (and unwarranted) financial burden. What&amp;#039;s more, devices such as the BlackBerry automatically upload SMS messages into your inbox along with your e-mail, incurring those charges automatically.  The same thing happened in the early days of wireless voice service. Someone called, you answered (caller ID was still a new thing to landlines), and the ticker started from the moment you pressed &amp;quot;send.&amp;quot; Eventually, carriers implemented the first-incoming-minute-is-free feature, letting you hang up on unwanted calls or talkreallyreallyfasttowantedcalls. Data services over cellular networks are an exploding business. But they should learn from their carrier colleagues. Until glitches in the billing strategies of this young industry are ironed out, there may be more surprised and angry customers than satisfied ones. \u2014Glenn Derene  Yikes! $72 in SMS charges for unsolicited text messages makes for a suprising billing statement. The list goes on and on: An uninterupted stream of text message charges on my cellular bill. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a3441/2689426/>