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Meg Lee doesn't fully understand what cell-phone wallpaper is, but she's paying for it to the tune of $19.95 a month.

Every month, charges from an Italian company — doing business in the U.S. as Blinko — for products Lee neither wanted nor received are appearing on her Verizon Wireless phone bill. Charges for wallpaper, ringtones and other downloadable products keep showing up, despite repeated attempts to cancel the service, Lee said.

"It's a real scam, and I think people should be made aware of it," she said.

Lee said Verizon refuses to remove or refund the charges. The company advised her to contact Blinko to reverse them, a suggestion that Lee and others have found is easier said than done, she said.

"I got billed again this month, and that's after I changed my cell phone number, because Verizon said there was nothing they could do about it and that changing my number was the only way to stop it," she said. "Well, it didn't."

Lee said she tried to cancel the charges through Blinko's toll-free number, but it referred her to the company's Web site. Attempts to cancel the service through the site were unsuccessful, because the site either crashed or went into a never-ending loop that brought Lee back to a different Web page, she said.

Dozens of postings in Internet chat rooms chronicle similarly unsuccessful attempts.

Blinko, also known as Buongiorno USA, is the subject of an investigation by the Florida Attorney General's Office and a national class-action lawsuit.

Repeated calls and e-mails to Blinko, which has its U.S. headquarters in Miami, Fla., were not returned.

Though the company has customers who intentionally order its products, it's clear that Blinko is using tactics such as unsolicited text messages and deceptive "free offers" to hook customers into monthly charges of $9.95 and up, said Myles McGuire, a Chicago attorney who filed the class-action lawsuit against Blinko in January.

The suit, which is still in the discovery stage, could have "tens of thousands" of plaintiffs by the time it's resolved, McGuire said.

"It's an outrageous situation, because these charges should not be there in the first place, and in a lot of instances the company getting money from the end customer is the phone company," he said.

"The phone bill is basically being used as a credit card, and people are being forced to pay these third-party charges because they don't want their phone service cut off."

Third-party vendors pay cell phone providers a commission of up to 35 percent for billing customers, McGuire said.

A spokeswoman for Verizon said Blinko was recently "placed on probation."

"What that means is we're currently not enrolling any new customers, and we'll continue to monitor this company closely to ensure that they're following the best-practices guidelines," said Verizon's Georgia Taylor.

About 2,000 customers have disputed charges from Blinko on their phone bills, but they constitute a small minority of Verizon's Blinko subscribers, Taylor said.

"This issue is on our radar, but 95 percent of our customers are satisfied with the service," she said.

Suffice it to say that Lee is not among the 95 percent, Lee said.

"Verizon should take some responsibility for this, and they told me they're aware of it and are working on it, but working on it doesn't help people being taken by it, especially when Verizon won't remove the charges," she said.

What's particularly bad about Blinko is that the company appears to lull customers into monthly charges without their knowledge, McGuire said.

In one scenario, people receive an unsolicited text message in the form of a horoscope or a joke-of-the day. Unless they decline the text message or type in the correct reply, they'll begin being charged $9.95 a month as "Blinko Club" members, he said.

Another scenario stems from an offer advertising a free ringtone. The fine print on the offer divulges that by accepting the free ringtone, you're authorizing a similar $9.95 monthly charge, even if you never order another Blinko product, McGuire said.

What's particularly troubling to Lee is that people can ultimately be victimized by the company even without ever receiving a text message or signing up for a ringtone because of the company's flawed registration process, she said.

"If you go on their Web site, you'll see that all you have to do is type in a cell-phone number and the name of the cell-phone provider and you'll start getting billed, which means anyone that knows your number and your cell-phone company can sign you up without your knowledge," she said.

The Office of Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist opened an investigation of Blinko in October 2005 and cannot comment on the company because the investigation has yet to be resolved, said office spokesman John Sherer.

The Better Business Bureau of Southeast Florida's Web site reports 186 complaints against Blinko over the last 36 months.

Representatives from other cell-phone providers said they were not aware of specific complaints against Blinko.

McGuire said phone companies should more actively protect their subscribers from abuses.

"The goods and services that can be bought through cell phones are a boon to phone companies because it's not much work for them," McGuire said. "It's incidental revenue, but it's significant revenue and growing very rapidly, and the phone companies should have a procedure in place for determining legitimate consent."