Paying the premium for texts

What's the story with premium-rate texts?Some companies in the premium-rate SMS business like to call themselves service providers, but they provide nothing of the kind, unless sending high-cost but ultimately worthless text messages to unsuspecting mobile-phone users can be classified as a service.

It is a growing problem. Children who sign up for free ring-tones and wallpapers have their call credit swallowed up by charges that are buried deep in the terms and conditions, while adults who have never knowingly signed up for any mobile-phone messaging service are being hit with massive bills.

Broadcaster Leo Enright was bored on a flight last December and decided to tidy up the bookmarks on his internet-enabled phone. As he idly scrolled through bookmarked web pages he noticed a whole string of links he didn't recognise. He suspected they were spam messages and when he returned to Ireland he contacted his mobile-phone operator to find out more. He was less than pleased to be told that he had been charged over €2 for each of the messages, a total cost of €35.

All the messages were WAP Push messages, essentially messages containing links to internet pages. He demanded that they be stopped immediately and asked his phone operator to explain how he had been signed up to them. "They said I apparently accepted an offer of a free Bluetooth headset last December. I never accepted a headset from anyone and if I did, where is it? I certainly never received it." He also rang the Regulator of Premium Rate Telecommunication Services (Regtel), and quickly formed the impression it was not tough enough with the company who sent him the premium-rate messages.

"You can ring the so-called regulator and they will contact the so-called service provider, although I refuse to use that term because it suggests I have some sort of relationship with the company who was sending the messages," says Enright. The company discontinued the "service" and offered him a refund. "That's not the point," he says. "This is fraud. If I am in a hotel and someone comes into my room and steals my money, is it enough for the hotel then to just simply replace it?"

The more Enright has learned about the company's modus operandi the more incensed he has grown. He has gone as far as to ring the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation and, while the gardaí he spoke to were sympathetic, they said there was little they could do, given the absence of any legislative framework governing the sending of high-cost mobile-phone spam.

"Politicians do not seem to be remotely interested in it as an issue," he says. He is right - a quick check of the Oireachtas archive reveals very few mentions of the problems associated with unsolicited premium-rate messages over the last five years. "I don't think many people are aware this is happening," Enright told PriceWatch last week.

One person who is certainly aware it is happening is the Regtel director, Pat Breen. He is in the process of rubber-stamping an updated code of regulations for the industry to ensure that the increasingly common fraudulent activity comes to an end and offenders are brought to heel.

The updated regulations to be published later this month will demand that any company wishing to launch a new WAP Push service will have to clear all promotional material with Regtel in advance. When the initial free message promoting the WAP service is sent out it will have to contain clear pricing instructions and unsubscribe instructions. The first premium-rate message should then be sent out within a matter of minutes of the initial promotional message, to ensure that there is no confusion about charges.

These new guidelines are in addition to existing rules which state that subscribers to premium-rate texts are supposed to be told when they have spent €20 on a service, with the maximum spend limited to €40.

"We do not want people being charged premium rates simply by following a link in a WAP message," Breen said last week. "We cannot have a situation where people are not aware of what is happening and how much they are being charged, so we are revising the code that operators must adhere to."

He says that while the number of complaints about WAP messages has increased in recent months, the volume is still small. "It is something that might be a problem down the road so we are pre-empting the situation," Breen says. "If there are consumers out there who believe that they have a cause for complaint then I want to hear from them."

While the new regulations are to be welcomed, there are no guarantees that certain repeat offenders will pay any heed to them. Breen says plans to name and shame companies who routinely breach its regulations and con consumers are back on track and he hopes to be in a position to post details about the serial offenders on the Regtel website later this month.

For his part, Leo Enright is considering mounting a legal challenge against the company responsible for sending him the messages. "I have a personal relationship with my phone. It is an integral part of my life and these people have made me afraid to use it."

Enright believes that penalties need to be greater for those found to be guilty of sending out high-cost unsolicited messages: "The sooner people are sent to jail for stealing money out of mobile-phone accounts the better."