AT&T's mad as hell that people are buying its prepaid phones in quantity for the sole purpose of unlocking and reselling them, and it's not going to take it anymore. The megacarrier has filed a lawsuit in Texas targeting so-called phone traffickers who are allegedly sending boatloads of people -- "runners" as they're called -- into AT&T's retail locations to pick up GoPhones and circumvent its per-person purchase limits. To AT&T's credit, the DMCA's exemption on phone unlocking doesn't protect those looking to profit from the sale of unlocked phones, so the lawsuit looks pretty straight on the surface; TracFone has made a killing recently in its legal pursuits, and it turns out that one of TracFone's lawyers is involved with AT&T's case, too, so the defendants might be staring down the barrel of a big ol' fine here. Besides AT&T and TracFone, AT&T's court filing claims that T-Mobile, Virgin Mobile, and Nokia (huh?) have all filed similar lawsuits recently, and the legal team promises there are more in the pipe. Anyway, let's try to keep the GoPhone purchases to under a hundred units a day until this all blows over, okay?

We always thought one of the big draws of prepaid plans was simplicity, but AT&T's looking to prove us wrong with a series of new add-ons available with its GoPhone service. Customers can now tack on 3,000 off-peak minutes for $20, messaging plans ranging from 200 messages for $5 up to 3,000 for $20, and a pair of data plans: 1MB for $1 and 5MB for $5. With us so far? Good, but here's where it gets kinda weird: the 3,000 off-peak minute package can only be added for GoPhone customers paying the optional $1 / day fee to lower their per-minute talk rates from 25 cents to 10 cents. AT&T's billing the data as the only prepaid data packages among major competitors, so we figure that's good news for the prepaid world -- we think, anyway, once we make sense of it all.

There's plenty of us who aren't exactly fond of commitments, especially those multi-year types that wireless providers try to rope you into whenever they drop a snazzy new phone. But if you're looking to snag a prepaid GoPhone / TracFone for the entire family, you may have to take your business somewhere other than Wally World. The world's largest retailer is cracking down on "entrepreneurs" (read: notorious phone hackers) who are buying the subsidized handsets "by the hundreds to resell for profit," by reducing the amount of prepaid mobiles one can purchase from three to two. While "two national carriers" voiced support for Wal-Mart's decision, the only confirmed provider was said to be Cingular, who certainly doesn't stand to profit from selling prepaid devices sans (pricey) prepaid air time. While the company hasn't exactly figured out how to stop tricksters from circumventing the system by purchasing multiple units at varying registers, at least the restrictions give parents with teenage triplets (or quadruplets) a valid excuse to delay their gratification.

In case you haven't heard, Cingular has an official corporate policy of not talking to us (no, seriously) so forgive us in taking a few days to gather all the requisite details of Pantech's new C120 for Cingular's GoPhone prepaid service. The diminutive candybar serves as Pantech's followup to the crazy-small C300 clamshell; like the C300, it's initially available exclusively through GoPhone, but we wouldn't be surprised to see it head over to postpaid before terribly long. Considering the handset moves for $140 contract-free, the C120 holds its own with a 128 x 128 color display, speakerphone, and VGA cam, but with a mere 2.5MB of memory on board, don't expect to fill 'er up with your favorite tunes.

[Via Slashphone]