£1.50 text charge?????

Intasun32

alex99 wrote: »

- although one of them (T-mobile) will allow its customers to block this stuff if you really pester them.

@Alex99

You don't even have to pester them, or e-mail and call them as I did. You just log-in to your 'My T-Mobile' account and check the 'Price Plan' tag. In 'Additional Services' you will see 'Charge To Account Bar', once this box is checked it bars all incoming and outgoing short codes. Simple, now that's how a good network acts towards its customers. Take note the rest of you....

:T

Redux quoted on post #23:

'....I suspect someone ordered the stuff on the website and couldn't remember their own number.'

A long shot but I very much doubt it, I think that you are too trusting.

lawbunny

Hey,

Unfortunately, very often when customers call regarding these "unsolicited texts", a look through their call records shows sent texts to the third party beforehand (often at rather dodgy times ie 2am on a friday night - drunken after pub time!), and speaking from my own experience a lot of the time these apparantly unsolicited texts are on phones which are being used by the account holder's teenage kids (who are always perfect little darlings and have said it was not them therefore it is not and so the network is obviously to blame!).

I am in no way saying these third party companies are not despicable: I am very aware of the cons they use to get you to subscribe (ie thinking it's a one time ringtone deal, or simply entering your telephone number into a website). I am only pointing out that the hype surrounding these texts give people the idea that it is always an illegal activity where you have been signed up fraudulently by a company, when in fact most of the time it is legitimate. That being said, I don't understand why some networks will not allow you to block these texts: as said above, T-Mobile offer this facility (it's simply one click of a button) - has anyone contacted Directors' Offices of other networks with complaints to find out about this?

Hootie19

Well, we are more than embarassed, and not to mention utterly blazing mad, to discover; after a great deal of digging around, and phone calls to and from the various telephone operator companies that it was indeed for credits for the Sunday League game. And after much prompting, it turns out that it was indeed one of our teenage sons :mad::mad:. (This bears out what lawbunny and others suggested above.)

I am horrified at what an accomplished liar he is. He had glib explanations for everything and it was only when his dad mentioned contacting the police and the fraud investigators that the penny dropped and he realised that he could get into some serious trouble and the confessions came.

Anyway, slightly to his credit, he went straight to the bank and took out the money to repay us what we have (so far) been charged.

We are now having to write grovelling apologetic emails to the companies we have accused of taking money from our accounts without permission etc.

Lessons have been learned all round now though.

Thanks to you all for your support throughout this - we can only apologise for leading you all up a very winding garden path.

alex99

Hootie19 wrote: »

Well, we are more than embarassed, and not to mention utterly blazing mad, to discover; after a great deal of digging around, and phone calls to and from the various telephone operator companies that it was indeed for credits for the Sunday League game. And after much prompting, it turns out that it was indeed one of our teenage sons :mad::mad:. (This bears out what lawbunny and others suggested above.)

I am horrified at what an accomplished liar he is. He had glib explanations for everything and it was only when his dad mentioned contacting the police and the fraud investigators that the penny dropped and he realised that he could get into some serious trouble and the confessions came.

Anyway, slightly to his credit, he went straight to the bank and took out the money to repay us what we have (so far) been charged.

We are now having to write grovelling apologetic emails to the companies we have accused of taking money from our accounts without permission etc.

Lessons have been learned all round now though.

Thanks to you all for your support throughout this - we can only apologise for leading you all up a very winding garden path.

Thanks for letting us all know the outcome - very big of you in the circumstances. As a parent of teenage children myself I sympathize entirely with the predicament in which you find yourselves.

At least we can rest assured that, at least on this occasion, the crooks have not found a way to charge for ghost messages sent.

The companies involve only have themselves to blame for the fact that we (most of us at least) jumped to the conclusion that they were at fault. There are countless episodes where these very firms have been shown (unequivocally) to have been behind various scams. Dialogue Communications stole from my wife and her itemized bills proved that she had not made the calls they said we had made to sign up for their reverse charge spam.

Regards

Alex99

lawbunny

Hey, sorry to hear the trouble with your sons, but I'm glad you let us all know the outcome to assist people in future.

As alex99 says, it's terrible that these companies have earned themselves such an appalling reputation that people just assume they are at fault: guess they only have themselves to blame!!!

I just hope people remember this when they call and shout at people like myself at customer services haha!

alex99

Forgot to mention .............

Even though (scandalously) you can't do anything to protect yourself against completely unsolicited reverse charge spam, you can do something to protect yourself (to some extent) against the sort of situation in which Hootie19 and loboexe found themselves.

Ask your network providers to block all outgoing calls from all your family mobiles and your landlines to all 09 numbers and short codes - they are all obliged to let you do this.

redux

Intasun32 wrote: »

@Alex99
Redux quoted on post #23:

'....I suspect someone ordered the stuff on the website and couldn't remember their own number.'

A long shot but I very much doubt it, I think that you are too trusting.

Well, I received a number of service messages, not charged for, containing links to download files I would not have been charged for even if I did, as the payment is separate. So perhaps someone else had bought these services somehow.

As I said, it is actually impossible to directly subscribe that fax number to anything, and nobody in the world except me and Orange has a permanent record of it except on phone bills at least five years old

Intasun32

lawbunny wrote: »

I am only pointing out that the hype surrounding these texts give people the idea that it is always an illegal activity where you have been signed up fraudulently by a company, when in fact most of the time it is legitimate. That being said, I don't understand why some networks will not allow you to block these texts: as said above, T-Mobile offer this facility (it's simply one click of a button) - has anyone contacted Directors' Offices of other networks with complaints to find out about this?

Lawbunny.

I wish there was lots of media 'HYPE' about the mobile phone scams that many of us have been victims, but there is not. If anything it is played down, swept under the carpet. It is a problem that is ignored by the networks (except T-Mobile), DTI, Ofcom, PhonePayPlus (Of course), our law makers in Parliament and the Police (due to a 'quirk' in legislation). It also is not 'high brow' enough for the media, TV & national papers to take up, so where does it leave the victims who have been scammed for millions over the years?

The answer is on forums such as this trying to learn of other scams and bringing to light the dangers of the scams to mobile phone owners who are ignorant of the problem until they are scammed, as were I. Yes, I am sure that there are drunks who sign up for !!!!!! after a few pints on a Friday night, as you have quoted, but what about the youngsters on PAYT ( the most scammed media) who find themselves receiving unsolicited !!!!!!, jokes and ringtones and having to pay for it, unable to get it stopped?

As you will see, I have nothing but praise for T-M for allowing customers to block short codes. let's hope the others will follow.

lawbunny

Hey Intasun32, I fully agree with you. I was only pointing out that through my experience I have noted that quite often the texts are not as unsolicited as people think.

However, you bring up a good point about the children on payg recieving these messages: I have spoken to numerous children who are obviously scared as they don't know why they are getting these messages (even the non-adult ones) and are afraid to tell their parents where all of their credit is going for fear of getting the blame. That's why even though it's kinda against TM policy (don't add bar unless person asks for it) I always inform customers of this bar if their call is related to these third party texts and offer to add it for them, even when they've not asked me about it.

alex99

lawbunny wrote: »

Hey Intasun32, I fully agree with you. I was only pointing out that through my experience I have noted that quite often the texts are not as unsolicited as people think.

Well, there is a continuum of cases. At one extreme there are (or so I am told) companies who actually wait until their customers explicitly request something before sending it to them. At the other extreme are the numerous companies (and this is well documented on the PhonePayPlus site) who either generate numbers at random hoping to get a hit or buy lists of real numbers from other unscrupulous companies and sent out their completely unsolicited reverse charge spam on a huge scale.

As you note, most reverse charge SMS, it is probably true to say, comes from neither of these two extremes, but from companies who trick kids into signing up - by, for example, offering "free" ringtones that are not really free at all because those who elect to receive them become "subscribers" to an ongoing "service" without realizing it. Again, there is a continuum of cases in this area from companies who blatantly lie, though to those who merely mislead while sticking to the letter of the law.

Since there is absolutely no sign whatsoever that PhonePayPlus are going to do anything significant to clean up the "industry" any time soon and since all the big networks seem content to continue laundering money on behalf of international organized crime (for, make no mistake, that's what many of those involved in premium rate are) the only way we customers (especially those of us with children) can protect ourselves is to bar all outgoing premium rate calls, (if with T-mobile) bar all incoming PR calls, and scrutinize our bills every month.

And sending unsolicited premium rate texts is what the relatively honest PR people do. Invomo have just been cited as the network providers in a scam on the PhonePayPlus site where fake Microsoft error messages were sent to people's computers telling them that they had to ring a number to receive a fix. The number was a PR number that cut out after two minutes.

And then there are the fake parcel delivery "services", rogue diallers, fake competitions, "missed number marketing" and on and on and on.