On July 24, 2025, the FCC proposed eliminating the rule that forces carriers to put third-party charges in their own labeled section of your phone bill, separate from your plan and with its own subtotal. That sounds like a filing-cabinet footnote until you realize it's the exact mechanism that lets you catch a stray $9.99 "voicemail" or "member fee" charge riding along with your data plan (the FCC's NPRM went to the Federal Register on August 22, 2025).
Quick answer
Two different things get billed through a carrier bill, and they need different handling. Legitimate direct carrier billing — paying for an App Store or Play Store purchase via your phone bill — is basically dead in the US now; the last carrier still offering Google Play billing cut off new signups in March 2025. "Cramming" is unauthorized third-party charges (horoscope texts, ringtone clubs, generic "subscription services") billed under vague labels. To find them: pull your itemized bill, look for the section carriers are required to separate from plan charges, scan for generic-sounding line items, and use your carrier's block feature — which varies a lot by carrier and doesn't cover every billing path.
Two mechanisms, one billing pipe
Direct carrier billing lets you buy something from an app store or a recognized merchant and have the charge land on your phone bill instead of a card — no new payment method, no OTP, just tap and it's billed next cycle. It's been a real, large channel, serving close to 12 million US households at its peak. "Cramming" is the abuse case: unauthorized or deceptive charges placed on a bill through the same billing rails, usually via premium SMS or a third-party billing platform, without the account holder's clear consent (the FTC's own definition).
Both flow through identical plumbing, which is precisely why regulators forced carriers to separate and label them. The abuse cases that put cramming on the map are not new — AT&T settled for $105 million in 2014, T-Mobile for at least $90 million months later, and Verizon and Sprint together paid $158 million to the FCC and states in 2015, after being accused of pocketing roughly a third of every "crammed" charge themselves. Those are 2014-2015 numbers; there hasn't been a comparable headline enforcement wave since. What's actually moving right now is the opposite direction: the FCC's 2025 proposal would strip out several of the disclosure rules that wave of settlements put in place, while claiming the ban on unauthorized charges itself stays intact — a bit like repealing the smoke-detector rule while insisting the no-arson law still covers you.
Meanwhile the legitimate side of carrier billing has been quietly shutting down. Verizon dropped Google Play carrier billing in 2021, AT&T in 2022, T-Mobile in August 2024, and US Cellular — the last holdout — stopped new signups in March 2025. No major US carrier still lets you pay for a Play Store purchase through your phone bill. Apple's version survives only in specific country/carrier partnerships, not as a general US option. So if a charge shows up claiming to be an "app purchase," that explanation is worth questioning rather than accepting.
What the itemized bill is supposed to show you
Existing FCC rules require carriers to list third-party charges in a section distinct from your own plan charges, with its own subtotal, and a plain-language description naming the actual service provider. In practice, the charges that slip past people don't announce themselves — historically they've shown up labeled as things like "member fee," "voicemail," "service charge," "other fees," "calling plan," or "web hosting." None of those tell you what you're actually paying for, which is the point of the disclosure rule and also the reason the 2025 rollback proposal matters: comments closed September 22, 2025, and if the separate-section requirement goes, that audit trail gets harder to follow.
It's the same habit I use scanning a bank statement for a charge I don't recognize — pull the full itemized PDF, not the summary total, and read every line instead of trusting the "amount due." The same discipline applies to reading a bank statement for hidden subscriptions: cryptic descriptors are cryptic on purpose, whether they're sitting on a phone bill or a card statement.
Blocking it, carrier by carrier
US carriers don't handle this uniformly. AT&T offers a Purchase Blocker and an online portal for viewing and canceling third-party mobile charges. Verizon lets you text CANCEL, STOP, or UNSUBSCRIBE to a program's short code to opt out — but its own Usage Controls terms state plainly that "spending limits for Premium Messaging are not supported," so a spending cap doesn't touch this category. T-Mobile will apply a free block on third-party charges on request, and separately offers a message-blocking toggle, with an explicit warning that blocking all texts also blocks one-time security codes.
UK carriers split along similar lines. Vodafone, O2, and EE can apply a full bar on third-party "Charge to Mobile" charges on request — EE also requires a PIN sent to your handset before any third-party signup completes. Three has told customers it's unable to implement that bar at all. Setting a spend cap to £0, offered by several UK carriers, blocks most premium outgoing charges but doesn't reliably stop billing from incoming premium-rate texts — the distinction between "spend cap" and "full bar" is exactly the kind of detail that trips people up when they follow generic advice.
None of these carrier tools cross-reference what you've actually chosen to subscribe to elsewhere — a phone bill audit is a separate pass from checking a card statement or a subscription tracker like Subnesio, because carrier billing isn't a channel either one sees automatically. Keeping an independent list of what you knowingly signed up for (I keep mine on Subnesio's pricing page as a baseline, but a spreadsheet works too) gives you something concrete to check the itemized bill against, line by line, instead of trusting the label the carrier printed.
P.S. — Reply comments on the FCC's proposal were due October 21, 2025. Whether the separate third-party bill section survives past this rulemaking is still open as of this writing, which is a good reason to screenshot your itemized bill now, while the section still has to exist.
