Amp’d Mobile has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. While this may come as shocking to many, including myself, it gets even stranger in my opinion.

Apparently, Amp’d owes more than $100 million to creditors, and is having a difficult time coming up with the money. A large part of the problem is their own customers. Amp’d saw significant growth in their user base when they started advertising on MTV late last year. A large portion of these customers chose an 18 month service contract. There is nothing unusual there. What is unusal to me, is that 80,000 of their customers didn’t end up paying. That is nearly half of their 175,000 subscribers.

It is the fact that nearly 50% of their subscribers failed to pay that is really surprising to me. I’ve never heard of anything like that before. I guess time will tell if Amp’d manages to survive their own customers.