News
AT&T settles class action on unauthorised charges
Tim Green Jun 3 2008, 11:08am
Comments (2)
AT&T has reached a settlement with customers over claims of unauthorised charges from D2C firms.
The settlement, preliminarily approved by a Georgia court on Friday, entitles AT&T Mobility customers to receive refunds. It relates to over a dozen lawsuits that were filed throughout the country that alleged there were not adequate safeguards in place to ensure that customers are only billed for services they agreed to purchase.
It could prove a benchmark for the mobile content industry in the US.
Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile currently face similar lawsuits. Attorneys Jay Edelson, Myles McGuire and Scott A. Kamber of KamberEdelson, who represented the class action, said: “This is both a great result for the class and should put a lot of pressure on other carriers to demonstrate that they, too, are serious about their customers’ welfare.”
Comments
“Maintaining Direct Authorization Would Have Avoided This Problem”
Posted by: Jeremy Kagan - Jun 3, 1:12pm
This whole problem could have been avoided if AT&T and each of the other operators retained their core competency and forced the use of their existing state of the art user authentication and payment authorization mechanisms for ALL transactions- even off-portal.
This can be tricky when dealing with aggregators and other third parties, which opens up problems like this.
However, by using "Federation" and other online identity management concepts, a new commercial model is available that enables operators to not only use their existing authentication and authorization infrastructure for off-portal transactions, but it enables secure off-off-portal transactions from the open web as well.
With ISPs, banks, and major content names already signed on to this model, there are significant market references that validate this model. The mobile industry can gain from this as well.
The model is called OneTouch Online Purchasing(tm), and it is provided by eBIZ.mobility.
Jeremy Kagan
CEO, eBIZ.mobility
“WAP billing is the way forward”
Posted by: Anil Malhotra at Bango - Jun 3, 3:28pm
The good news is that the industry is adopting a web-style mobile payments experience which gives the consumer a clear and transparent statement of any charges for mobile content.
It's been promoted by the main mobile networks - for example in the UK, through Payforit, and in the US through the MMA Best Practice Guidelines. It's already been adopted by most of the leading D2C brands (see www.bango.com/casestudies ). The problems that lead to these kinds of class action suits should now be a thing of the past.
Anil Malhotra, Bango
anil@bango.com