Some Ringtones Come With A Catch

If you've ever wondered why someone downloads ringtones for a cell phone, just ask a teenager.

"Say if you had like a girlfriend or something, and she called, you could have kind of like a love-song playing," Jake Mauney told Greenville television station WYFF.

Mauney, 14, got a new cell phone for Christmas, and wanted to get a cool ringtone for it.
He saw an ad for what seemed to be fairly inexpensive songs for his phone.

"Think (it was), like, $2.49, and I was willing to pay it," he said.

But Mauney's mom got a shock when the phone bill came.
It wasn't just a one-time charge, either. There were $18 items for January, February and March. But Jake had only downloaded one song.

So Fran called the cell phone company.

"She said, 'Oh, you have got many, many, many ringtone charges. He's been getting text messages, and every time he opens that text message, they're charging him either $1.49, $2.99, $3.99'," she said.

It turned out that by downloading that one song, Jake signed up for three ringtone services from M-Gube, Katazo and Jamster. All three would send text-message updates, and when Jake opened them, he was charged for it.

"And I didn't know that clicking on it and opening it ... would cost me $2, $3," he said.

Services like Jamster do state in the fine print that by downloading their ringtones, you are subscribing to their service, and you have to cancel to stop any additional charges.

But because Jake used his cell phone to access Jamster, he never saw the fine print.