Last week, T-Mobile (my cell phone provider) pinged me with a rude message: Henceforth we will screw you out of an extra $5 a month.

WHAT?! Had I done something wrong? No. Would I be getting some added benefit for my five bucks? No. It seems that T-Mobile bean counters have just arbitrarily decided that we customers who use credit cards to pay our phone bills online must pay an extra fiver each month as a payment processing fee. Yes, we’re to pay them to take our money. Bonnie and Clyde were not that brazen!

You can avoid the add-on IF you give your bank account number to T-Mobile, allowing it (and who knows who else?) to have direct access to your personal stash of cash. Uh… NO! Tut-tut say the T-Mobilers, your private info is perfectly secure with us. Do they think we have suckerwrappers around our heads? Just eight months ago, their “security system” let thieves swipe the personal data of 37 million customers, including names, account numbers, addresses, phone numbers, and birthdates.

Well, sniff “free-market” ideologues, just switch to a competitor. But AT&T, Verizon, etc. have all adopted the exact same thieving “give-us-your-bank-account” scheme. Phone service today is a shared monopoly, not a free market, and it’s now copycatting airlines, banks, and other monopolistic profiteers that constantly fabricate add-ons and pricing gimmicks to gouge consumers.

T-Mobile rose to telecom prominence a decade ago by attacking its rivals for overcharging and abusing consumers. It ran ads publicly demanding that AT&T and others stop their greedy practices “because it’s the right thing to do.” But now that it’s a monopolistic giant, T-Mobile’s new line is that might makes right, so it has joined the industry’s consumer-abuse greed game.

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