Phone watchdog gets tough on offenders

UK TELECOMS enforcer, Phonepayplus, is starting to get very tough indeed on breaches of the code on supplying premium rate services. It's just handed out a £100,000 fine to Netsize.

The fine is over a promotion which read: "There is a message for you. Text CHAT to 89896 now!" The sneaky bit was that the messages were received from places like Germany, France and even Azerbaijan.

It was supposed to look as if a real person was trying to contact you. In fact, it was merely an invitation to join a 'chat' service which would cost a total of £4.50 [three premium rate SMS messages] a week.

Netsize and the Unify Media group which was actually supplying the service said that around 10,000 had managed to opt out of the service before it started costing them a fortune. That shows just how many people were falling for the ploy.

Incidentally, - according to the rules - in order to prevent further messages being sent to your phone by any provider in the UK, sending the word 'stop' to the shortcode or phone number which provided the text must work.

So sending the word 'stop' to 89896 would have worked in this instance. But the INQ recently had a complaint from a reader that this doesn't always work.

It turned out he was sending two words – 'stop sending'. That simply doesn't work. You have to send the word stop on its own and nothing else.

The complaint revealed another protective measure that the INQ, at least, wasn't aware of until now. If you're on the receiving end of premium rate messages, the provider must send you a warning message for free.

This warning should either be sent monthly or when your bill reaches £20. In the case in question, the warnings should have gone out every five weeks but nothing happened.

Given all these very naughty breaches of conduct, Phonepayplus fined the pair £100,000 which is a serious deterrent.

Under its former guise as ICSTIS, the watchdog's fines were too low. But in this last batch of adjudications, Payphoneplus handed out over £0.25 million in fines.

That's more like it. µ