I can confirm it can be abused really easily. Back in middle school (2006? 2007 maybe?) me and my friends used a firefox macro addon and a free anonymous text website to send a few hundred vulgar texts to a girl that one of us had recently broken up with.
The next day at school one of us got called into the office. The girl's parents had hired a private investigator to find out who sent the texts. My friend denied everything and there was no real evidence so no one got caught (turns out these types of shenanigans are NOT okay, and illegal).
We had racked up her phone bill into over-usage rates and I'm not sure if the carrier dropped the charges we had produced or whether her parents had to pay. I can't imagine that night's incoming text cost being below $200.
But now I believe most teenage girls in the US have unlimited texting.
The next day at school one of us got called into the office. The girl's parents had hired a private investigator to find out who sent the texts. My friend denied everything and there was no real evidence so no one got caught (turns out these types of shenanigans are NOT okay, and illegal).
We had racked up her phone bill into over-usage rates and I'm not sure if the carrier dropped the charges we had produced or whether her parents had to pay. I can't imagine that night's incoming text cost being below $200.
But now I believe most teenage girls in the US have unlimited texting.