Scam-like charges on my AT&T phone bill?

Okay, so I received an e-mail today informing me that my phone bill was available for viewing online, as is typical around this time of month.

My bill is usually around $92 to $95 a month and has combined DSL Lite for $19.95, a basic local calling plan that is about $45, a very basic long distance plan for like 13 cents a minute (costs $5 to $10 a month max for our long distance calls), and a few other misc. charges. We've been with them for years and years, and for the past year or so it has been around $92 a month.

$235.94 this month. Two companies listed on it that are causing these massive charges. One is "Zero Plus Dialing, Inc." (some kind of 3rd party company that the phone companies seem to 'let' take advantage of their own customers and charge them through the phone company for doing so).

The first one is "Billed on Behalf of LEGACY LD INTL INC" and listed under Zero Plus Dialing, Inc. $35. One 3 minute call from Henderson, KY to Atlanta, Georgia, which looks to have been on our receiving end. To my knowledge, none of the other 2 people in my house accepted any call like this. At any rate, this supposed call would factor out to be about $12 per minute. That's freaking insane and I could probably call to the other side of the world for less than half of that per minute.

The second set is "ILD Teleservices, Inc." and noted as "Billed on Behalf of INTELLICALL OPERATOR SVCS, INC." 4 calls, totaling $110.13 including some "administrative fee" of $6.53 and "Federal Universal Service Fund Fee" of $10.60 because of this set of calls, since it is grouped with them. This set of them has 3 calls from the same location, and the 4th from a totally different city in the same state. The other calls under Zero Plus Dialing, Inc. were also on the same day. All of these seem to be from 8/22/2008.

What I do not understand is why AT&T "The New Bellsouth" would allow some 3rd party company like this to charge me through my original phone company without them saying a word. I'll be calling them tomorrow, but I'm ticked off now and will be tomorrow, as well. I looked up Zero Plus Dialing, Inc. That's what they are. Some 3rd party company that charges rates about 10 times what they should be, and sometimes for calls that I read a lot about people not even making at all and not knowing anyone in the areas where the calls were made from/to. Some fought it and got their money back, and some didn't.

I'm planning on calling my phone company (AT&T) first, and then these two other companies if I can't get anywhere with AT&T. Have any of you dealt with this before? I came up with a "Consumer Affairs" website when I typed in Zero Plus Dialing, Inc. into a search engine. What do you think my chances are that my phone company will write this off, since I know nothing about this? Can I block any future collect calls so that this situation also won't come back up again?