I had a similar issue. I was in South America and saw the voice mail indicator on (my phone was on in case of emergency). I was expecting an important voice mail, but did not want to pay the outrageous roaming charges, so I started researching for ways to retrieve voicemail from a regular landline (I mean if regular phone service can do it, why wouldn't cell phone service do it...wishful thinking). I ended up trying this number, which I found in T-Mobile's website, several times, because the machine kept asking me for a PIN which I had no clue about. Finally I figured it out and was able to get my VM, so I figured this would work like a charm going forward.... until I got my bill charging me 2.99 for each call to that number. I could not understand why T-Mobile would charge me for calls that I made from a landline (or how they could even know about the calls). My guess is when I made each call, since it was a VM gateway, it would ask me for my mobile number and from then they would creatively (or mistakenly, depending on your personal opinion of cell phone carriers) make that show as an outgoing call. I called them and told them I could not understand how those calls would end up on my bill. They spent a couple minutes 'investigating' (not sure what there was to investigate) and came back saying they would refund me all calls to that number this time (it wasn't a lot, about $56), but that they thought this was weird and that if it ever happened again they probably would not be able to refund me. Obviously, there is no way I am using that gateway again and will have to go back to wait to check VM until I get back to the US.You would expect from a customer oriented organization they would develop and easy way to check VM from abroad w/o roaming charges, but then again the big assumption here is that they are a customer oriented organization.