Carriers like Tracfone and AT&T have set some serious precedents in the past couple years, sending warning shots over the bows of so-called prepaid phone traffickers who make pretty serious businesses out of buying prepaid phones in bulk, unlocking them (thereby nullifying the cash the carrier puts on the table to get the phone to market at a lower price), and reselling them to the highest bidders. T-Mobile USA has gotten on the action now, too, picking up a pair of permanent injunctions against Fone Xchange and ASPAC -- two of the biggest offenders in T-Mobile's eyes -- and a $6.5 million award for its troubles. Seems these guys won't take "no" for an answer, though, with T-Mobile also announcing that another gentleman violating a similar injunction awarded in Houston has been convicted of criminal contempt of court and is due to meet his steel-barred fate on October 10. So yeah, might want to settle down with those six-phone purchases from CVS there, bucko.

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?