Reader Stephen writes in to let us know that he somehow got signed up for a scammy “Joke of the Day” service that charged $9.99 to his Sprint account.

He was able to have the charges reversed and the service blocked, but wanted to warn others:

The other day, a Joke of the Day company tried signing me up to their texting service without my consent and immediately charged me $9.99 for the pleasure. I was able to get the charge reversed easily by calling customer service, but I know a lot of folks would think that simply unsubscribing via the instructions in the initial text message would be all they need to do. Normally I’d just let this sort of thing slide and wouldn’t try to submit it it to The Consumerist, but the CS rep I spoke with mentioned that it happened to her recently as well, so it’s likely that this company is hitting quite a few people up like this.

On his blog Stephen describes the mysterious text message:

So, Monday night/Tuesday morning, during the throes of another bout of “I can’t freaking fall asleep to save my sanity,” my cel phone starts chiming with a text message at 12:17AM. Half a minute later, there’s another text message alert. I drag myself out of bed, worried that some sort of disaster has hit friend or family, only to find that some jackasses at a Joke of the Day business had signed me up for their service without my asking. The two messages were congratulating me on signing up and giving me my special pin number. Too groggy and angry to deal with it right away, I just assumed there would be more messages coming and turned the phone off for the night in a vain effort to get some much needed rest.

6 mostly sleepless hours later, I turn my phone back on and find that there were indeed more messages, including the day’s joke. I’m reprinting it below so nobody has to cough up $9.99 for the one-month membership to receive this gem.

Joke of the Day:
Q: What did the doctor say when the patient complained, “Doctor, I feel stiff in the joints?”
A: “Then stay out of the joints!”

Wow. That joke is actually worse than we thought it would be. We took a look at the website Stephen mentions and it looks like you can enter any random phone number and doing so signs it up for the service. Great. That’s evil.

JokeMobi.com Tried To Screw Me Out Of Ten Bucks A Month And All I Got Was This Lousy Post [Kung Fu Rodeo]
(Photo:now brewing)

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