ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK: Is rampant cellphone scamming a conspiracy of con men?
It is astonishing that, more than 30 years into the cellphone revolution, mobile network operators still do not actively protect their own customers from abuse of their accounts.
It is astonishing that, more than 30 years into the cellphone revolution, mobile network operators still do not actively protect their own customers from abuse of their accounts. Social networks are regularly flooded with complaints about receiving inflated bills for unintended roaming, excessive data use, subscription services that were not requested, and failure to respect self-selected spending limits. The consensus - and it is generally wrong - is that the network operators themselves are scamming their customers. When a data bundle mysteriously depletes in hours or even minutes, the assumption is that the operator has stolen the data.The truth is more mundane and more complex: most smartphones constantly communicate with cellular towers to check for messages, updates to apps, and even updates to the information stored in the apps. This is usually referred to as background updates, and can range from a small app using minimal data to large apps ranging in size from 50MB to 100MB...
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