Look carefully at your monthly phone bill. You should know the type of services you signed up for. If anything looks suspicious, call your phone company and ask them to explain the charges to you. Look for things like Internet hosting services or long distance services that don't belong there.
Ask the phone company to cancel any fraudulent charge and reimburse you for the current month. You will probably find that this is all they will be willing to do. Next, demand that the phone company blocks all third party charges to your account. The ethical thing to do would be for the government to revise the law in favor of the consumer, requiring them to authorize third party charges on their own phone bills, but this is not even a consideration right now. While you are talking to your phone company, ask that they "freeze your long distance carrier." This will help prevent a company from changing your long distance service without your consent.
File a report with the FTC, your state Congressman, and your state attorney general. Also contact your local utilities commission. Reporting a phone bill cramming scam to the FCC is a waste of time as it does not fall under their jurisdiction. You may receive a sympathetic response from your Congressman with instructions on how to protect yourself in the future, but no offer to help fix the overall problem. You can call to confront the illegitimate companies that did this to you, but it won't get you far. The first company that you contact will be the billing company who only provides their billing services between the scammers and the phone company. They will claim to have nothing to do with any other services. If you call the company who perpetrated the scam, they will hang up, be rude to you, or provide a recording of your voice agreeing to a host of things that you never really did.
Learn how the scam works. Here's an example. A representative from the scammer company calls you and tries aggressively to convince you to say something affirmative, like "Yes" or "OK". They will offer you all sorts of things as they attempt to meet their goal. They record your responses and splice them to suit their illegal needs. It's the equivalent of you calling someone and recording them saying "yes" and then playing the tape to the authorities with your voice asking, "Did you break into my home and steal $250,000 from me?" and them answering "yes." I know this sounds totally absurd, but it's exactly how you wind up paying $19.95 per month for something you never agreed to. The difference is that you wouldn't get away with it and yet, somehow they continue to. Learn how to identify these scammers when they call and only provide them with negative responses. It gets them aggravated very quickly. Just keep answering "no" as you hang up. Whatever it is they are offering, you probably don't want it anyway.
Tell everyone you know to check their phone bills regularly and to write letters to their elected government officials expressing outrage that this practice is allowed. Third party billing could survive and be a legitimate means of collecting money from someone if it were properly executed, but this is not the case. Consumers must be constantly on their guard until the agencies who are supposed to protect us do their job and put an end to obvious loopholes in the law governing third party billing on phone bills.
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