Text enforcer hands out heavy fine

A COMPANY which has previously won serious mobile industry plaudits for its services has just been fined a massive £50,000 by the UK's industry enforcer, ICSTIS.

The adjudication reads, "In its capacity as the company responsible for compliance with the ICSTIS Code of Practice, WIN (Wireless Information Network) Ltd were fined £50,000 and issued with a formal reprimand.

In addition, access to the service was barred for a period of 12 months and the service provider was instructed to refund all complainants." So that was a bit of a result for all the 46 people who had complained.

WIN was acting as the service provider for Summit Technologies. One of the chief complaints was that one consumer had sent the text 'Stop sending me this message'. The rules are that the Stop command should be interpreted as an indication that the recipient doesn't want to pay for anything else.

Summit's response was their software had seen the word ‘messages' and interpreted the letter ‘a' in that word as attempt to answer a multiple choice question where ‘a' happened to be the correct answer. Yeah, right. µ