Just sent an email to Consumerist.com. I'm putting in below:

Dear Consumerist,

I have been a customer of Verizon Wireless since 1998. Recently I upgraded my account and phone to a higher service with Unlimited Texting & Picture Messaging to anyone in the US and to ANY email address worldwide - I spend about $140 a month. About a month ago I started to notice that picture messages sent from my cell phone to Flickr, Mobypicture, Twitpic, and Facebook started having a signature added to them that basically advertises Verizon Wireless and their services.

Here's the newly added text:

This message has been sent using the picture and Video service from Verizon Wireless! To learn how you can snap pictures and capture videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/picture. Note: To play video messages sent to email, Quicktime@ 6.5 or higher is required.

When I send pictures to various services, like Twitpic, any text that I enter as captions or comments end up being removed and the signature ad is pushed to my account. Usually it's added to EVERY photo I upload. By pushed I mean that various websites have places to add text for the name/title of the picture and some allow a comment to be placed as a caption/description for the picture. An example of this can be found on my Flickr stream here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thenemrel/3815824725/. Other sites/services end up removing ALL the text from my picture message. Others just bounce my messages back to me.

I can't find anyway to turn off this 'feature'. And the ad itself is 236 characters long - well over the 140 limit for Twitter.

A week ago - after being frustrated by this - I decided to make a post on Verizon's Customer Forums. I'm not the only one this is affecting. Verizon's sales and technical support will not help ANY of us on this matter - except for the work-around mentioned above by buying even more of Verizon's services.

A lot of people are angry about this and it might even be a Terms of Service change that could prompt people to leave their contracts.

You can find the Verizon Wireless forum post here: http://forums.verizon.com/vrzn/board/message?board.id=Messaging&thread.id=3218

Do you have any ideas, suggestions or help?

Thanks,
Paul Hughes