Cramming (fraud)

Cramming is a form of fraud in which small charges are added to a bill by a third party without the subscriber's consent or disclosure. These may be disguised as a tax, some other common fee or a bogus service, and may be several dollars or even just a few cents. The crammer's intent is that the subscriber will overlook and ultimately pay these small charges.

According to the U.S. National Association of Attorneys General, cramming was the 4th most common consumer complaint of 2007 in the United States.

There are various forms of cramming.

Phone cramming is the practice of placing unauthorized charges on a telecommunication subscriber's home or mobile telephone bill.

Cramming is most common in the US, where the breakup of the Bell System left subscribers with different vendors for local and long-distance service. LEC billing consolidated charges from multiple vendors on one bill, but opened an opportunity (which does not exist elsewhere) for fraudulent vendors to add their own charges to the consolidated bills. This is not the same as telephone slamming, where an existing vendor is replaced with a rival without the client's informed consent.

In the UK all the UK mobile operators have a forced third party direct to bill scheme (chargetomobile 'payforit') and offer no opt out or blocking of third party billing (no cramming block) and no prevention of third parties from adding charges to consumers mobilephone bills.

In the USA an effort to prevent instances of cramming, some members of the third party billing industry have implemented screening and monitoring measures to identify and eliminate crammers. Some companies offer consumer protection websites to help consumers better understand their phone bill and detect cramming as soon as it occurs.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) estimates that cramming has impacted tens of millions of American households.

Web-cramming involves billing consumers for a web page they did not even know they had.

This is most often accomplished when criminals develop new web pages for small businesses and non-profit groups for little or no expense. While advertising their service as free, these criminals actually engage in unauthorized phone charges on their victim's accounts. The most common scam involves "rebate checks." These checks, when cashed, transfer the customer's Internet service provider, placing monthly service charges on their telephone bill. This is made possible because telecommunications companies provide the service of being able to collect bills for companies that perform a service over the telephone.

...
Wikipedia