AT&T customers who have seen mysterious charges for ringtones and other content on their monthly bills may be eligible for refunds as part of a class-action lawsuit settlement.

Customers will able to claim refunds for charges that appeared on up to three of their cell phone bills between Jan. 1, 2004, and May 30, 2008, according to Jay Edelson, lead counsel for the plaintiffs. Edelson's firm has filed similar suits against Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile.

Vendors of ringtones and daily text message services with horoscopes and jokes solicit customers to sign up by entering their phone numbers on websites or by sending text messages. The charges, which can be hidden or poorly explained, show up later on cell phone bills, often as recurring charges.

The carrier keeps some of the fee and passes the rest to the content provider.

AT&T now requires customers who sign up for third-party services with recurring fees to confirm by replying to a text message. It also requires the content providers to send monthly reminders with instructions on how to unsubscribe from such services.

"AT&T has taken aggressive action to put industry-leading safeguards in place to protect our customers from unauthorized changes from third parties. We believe this settlement is consistent with that approach," said AT&T spokesman Marty Richter.

Richter had no estimate for how much the settlement will cost AT&T. Given that the company already let customers contest the charges, he said the number who will get refunds through the settlement will be small.

The settlement was approved preliminarily on Friday by the Superior Court of Fulton County, Ga. A final approval hearing for the settlement is scheduled Dec. 8. Claims under the settlement must be filed within 90 days of the final approval of the settlement.

Notifications will soon go out to 70 million current AT&T Mobility customers.

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