A recent trend among Virgin Mobile users is to target ringtone and wallpaper download services such as Jamster, that automatically attempt to bill your account when you accept their welcome texts to the service. Recently, Virgin Mobile customers have begun to exploit their billing by using a prepaid account with less than $9.99 remaining. The customer joins Jamster, and gets access to the ringtones and wallpapers. After downloading everything they want, they cancel their account with Virgin Mobile and reactivate the phone on a new account.

Currently, the customers are getting away with this and ripping off Jamster and other cell phone download providers. Not like Jamster doesn’t appear to be a rip off itself.

It will be interesting what Virgin Mobile and other prepaid providers do, if anything, to combat this fraud, or if Jamster and other download providers will be left to re-evaluate their own billing strategy. It’s my guess that the likes of Jamster are left to foot the bill, and the prepaid providers don’t have any procedures in place for cancelling the reactive customers phone.

I have not done this myself, and I would not recommend doing this if you are a prepaid customer and want to willingly try to wrong Jamster or others. This is not a how to. There are legal consequences to this behavior, and there is also the possibility of having your phone permanently banned from your network.

NOTE: This is not only done by Virgin Mobile customers… The same exploitation could be done by Boost Mobile, T-mobile ToGo, Tracfone, and GoPhone customers. Though most of the cases I have heard of involved Virgin Mobile customers targeting Jamster.

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