Who’s responsible?

OAN and The Billing Resource gather charges from third-party billers such as Access Savings and My Billing Services and pay your local phone company to place them on your account. In 2006, OAN was added as a defendant in an FTC complaint against Nationwide Connections, a third-party biller. A federal court entered a judgment of more than $34 million against Nationwide in 2007, representing the total amount consumers paid for the bogus collect-call charges placed on their bills.

BSG Clearing Solutions, the corporate name behind OAN, said it "bears no responsibility for the fraudulent actions" in the FTC case and was itself "a victim of Nationwide’s fraud." Nevertheless, while admitting no wrongdoing, BSG paid $1.9 million in consumer redress to settle with the FTC in 2008 and agreed to a court order barring the firm from billing consumers for unauthorized charges and from misrepresenting to consumers that they were obligated to pay those fees.

We tried to contact the billers involved in Arwe’s case. My Billing Services didn’t return our call. We tracked Access Savings from Arwe’s phone bill, through OAN in Texas, to Membership Billing Service (a Florida company), to a mailing address in Boston, where directory assistance had no phone listing for Access Savings. BSG referred us to a contact in California. Finally we reached Dan Seebold, an Access Savings manager in Florida, who said, "We use the most current industry standards to avoid such fraudulent charges, but unfortunately at times it does happen."

That sort of bread-crumb trail can confuse people about who’s responsible for bogus charges. So can an alphabet soup of billing codes. Those used by BSG, the leading aggregator with 85 percent of the third-party billing market, include OAN, HBS, USBI, ESBI, and ZPDI.

BSG’s record of 750 complaints over the past three years earned it a C rating from the Better Business Bureau. Leslie Komet Ausburn, a BSG spokeswoman, says that’s a small number compared with the billions of BSG transactions per year.

"Crammers make a lot of money because only half of all consumers ever catch the small charges and complain," says Bob Schoshinski, an FTC staff lawyer. For example, when Arwe disputed the charges, a Verizon customer-service representative checked earlier bills and found that My Billing Services had snagged him for $33 more over three previous months.