CYBERSPACE—Despite outages to voice, text messaging and data services Tuesday that affected nearly 2 million people, or 5 percent, of its subscribers, T-Mobile apparently provides its customers with special benefits that the other mobile-wireless carriers do not seem to offer ... yet. Like pictures of topless women with the bill.
It is unclear exactly how many subscribers are receiving the windfall, but Andrew surely is. He told The Consumerist that a recent perusal of his online bill was, well, an eye-popping experience.
"This past weekend, I received a e-mail from [T-Mobile] saying that my new bill was ready to be viewed and paid for," he wrote the consumer-obsessed website. "Being the expeditious person that I am, I logged in to T-Mobile's website, whipped out my trusty credit card, and paid my bill online that same day. In doing so, I made a mental note to print out a copy of the bill for my records on Monday morning when I got to work (where I have a printer access). A little on the anal-retentive side, I'd agree with you, but whatever.
"Anyways," he continued, "I logged into the T-Mobile website this morning to do all of this, and attached to this e-mail is a screen shot of my profile page after I finished logging in. Notice anything odd at the bottom of the page, perhaps in the right hand side of the screen, where it says "Connect with MobileLife"? ;)
"I assure you," he concludes, "that I don't upload pictures of topless women to my T-Mobile account, and that those pictures weren't from my camera phone (which I don't use, and even if I did, look at what type of phone I have! That crappy Razr couldn't take anywhere near that sort of clarity that those shots provide.)"
The Consumerist sent the pics to T-Mobile for an explanation. The carrier seemed oblivious—"T-Mobile is looking into it and investigating the situation"—and then responded with the strangest response when asked if they had heard of such an incident happening before. "Not common," they replied, which would seem to imply that it's not entirely uncommon.
That does it. Switching from Sprint this afternoon.
*Update*
After more reports surfaced of customers receiving what some are calling "pornographic" images with their online bills, T-Mobile responded with the following statement, sent to DailyTech.com:
T-Mobile is aware of reports from a few customers who have seen inappropriate or unwanted pictures in their online "MyAlbum" section within their MyT-Mobile account. We are taking these reports seriously and actively investigating these issues.
Our initial analysis of the reports leads us to believe that pictures were likely sent to some customers' mobile number by a third party, whether the customers knew the sender or not. If a customer has not had picture messaging enabled on their handset, a picture sent to them may be delivered only to their online MyAlbum account. For this reason, some customers are surprised when they see the picture for the first time in their MyT-Mobile account.
We will continue to investigate the reports but if customers would like to avoid receiving picture messages in the future they can explore using T-Mobile’s Message Blocking features which are accessed through their MyT-Mobile account online.
(Photo: Not the T-Mobile titties)
