Pocketables and the quarter million dollar scam
In 2018 my wife a text that I’d been charged $5 from Unlimited Gamez Mo. for a month of access to their crappy and limited selection of games. Shortly after that I got the same text. I checked with Sprint at the time and sure enough they’d just gone and entered our numbers in and charged a total of $10 via carrier billing and it was set to ongoing montly recurring.
I posted a piece about it at the time, short of it is they’re an Australian company incorporated in the Cayman Islands with a tenuous grasp on contract law that seems to be charging random blocks of numbers, most of which probably get disputed, but enough people not disputing it get charged to make it profitable.
Carriers are evidently doing little to nothing to block these charges from that company as I still get a lot of traffic on it. So much traffic that I had to check the stats on why a two year 3 month old article was trending on my dashboard today.
Short of it is in the past 27 months 53,161 people have searched and clicked on “What is this charge from Unlimited Gamez Mo.” I will make the assumption that all of them probably had a reason for this such as having been charged at least $5 for a subscription to a games service they didn’t ask for.
I mean, you all could just be dropping by because you like my style, but my assumption here is probably all but the first 3 days when it was on the main page are people who were charged and didn’t expect to be charged. I mean seriously, who goes to the UGM website and thinks “man, that’s some quality there” and signs up and forgets they signed up? I don’t think 53K did.
Assuming they got charged at least $5, which what we were charged, that’s $265,805 of fraudulent billing, no way to dispute with or contact them so you have to call your phone carrier, I’d say a minimum of 10 minutes of rep time – let’s say they’re making $14 an hour that’s 8,860 hours of representative time (and the same with customer time,) so thrown on another $124,042.00 in expenses related to clearing these charges.
17,720 hours of wasting people’s time / 738.33 days of of people’s life wasted on this company just based on the visits to this site / or about 2.02 years since… 2.15 years ago. So for every second our article’s been up basically it’s a second of someone’s life wasted dealing with Unlimited Gamez Mo. just based on the stats I have, and we’re a small freaking site.
What I can tell is they did slow down a bit during the pandemic for a couple of months, kicked it into high gear April, May, June, July, and August because you know nothing says class like charging people for something they didn’t order while they’re in the middle of a pandemic, a third of them are unemployed, etc.
So yeah, good job letting these people keep billing people with no recourse other than to call in and talk to a rep. Seriously, stop this carrier billing garbage T-Mobile, Boost, Virgin. Our little site’s math and history indicates you’ve spent $125K to deal with $266K of charges and not done anything about it to stop them.
Checking their site today looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2018, their privacy policy is still incorrectly linked to “http://unlimitedgamez.com/en/%22/privacy-policy/%22” (Correct link here)
The Sprint Billing terms will give you an internal server error, the boost terms an unhappy face, and it appears you can sign up with just a phone number and checking a box? Really wtf. 29 languages for the site tends to make me thinking this is probably a worldwide operation.
As a note, should you want to try it the contact info to call and speak to someone was accidentally posted on their signup page. It’s not on the contact us page: [email protected] or 1-877-840-6653.
