Cingular Wireless, text messaging and making money!

My husband is a C.P.A. although does not practice publicly but is in private accounting. He is good at his profession and has a thing with numbers.

He was surprised to see that we had a 11 cent charge on our Cingular Wireless bill which is our cell phone. We have one cell phone which is old and we do not text message and do not have friends that text message us. The phone is old that my teen-age daughter is embarrassed to borrow and be seen with it among her friends.

David studied the phone bill. The text message was from Cingular Wireless advertising some offers. He resents being billed although it is for only 11 cents and wonders how much Cingular Wireless made text messaging all their customers this offer and then charging them for the message. He guess it would be enough to pay somebody's bonus.

I have text messaging blocked in the account for my phone. The entire text message pricing for any plan is overly high considering it's for non real time use of air time and the amount of data used is almost insignificant. As you have found out, text messaging is a cash cow for the mobile phone companies.