Why can't operators stop unauthorised deductions from your balance?

brush6136

Or can they? About a year ago I had an issue with Bequizzled (my investigations reveal that they operate from The Netherlands & are owned by a Russian organisation).
I was tricked into thinking that a page was a promotion being offered by Tesco (it wasn't) & that's how they got my number, all this done on my mobile.
Despite what they say on their website they don't take any notice of requests to stop. They also say that if they don't manage to take the £4.50 per week "fee" from your balance that after a number of attempts they consider your account closed. Again untrue. I had a not very big balance with my provider (giffgaff) so I let it get down to pennies & managed ok on one of their goodybags.
After about six months I thought I'd buy some credit thinking that their system would have stopped taking amounts and because I was going over to Spain for a week & goodybags only work in the UK. All told I only lost about £12 so got off lightly.
When I enquired of giffgaff if they could prohibit these payments they said it was impossible, despite being pressed there was no explanation why this is. This meant that the number I had for around a decade I had to drop because the only way I could stop this was to move the account to a new number.
I had reported this to the relevant fraud authorities & although they updated me to say it was still under investigation eventually it just fell off their radar (not surprised).
But the main point here is I find it amazing that operators cannot stop this sort of thing. Does anyone know if this is correct?

Jon_01

I think you would have had better luck if you were with one of the other networks.

I found giffgaff to be a shambles. I reported a suspected fraud to them and they just ignored it! Which they can do very easily as they have no call centers and no one to actually talk to.

I know some of the other networks have teams to deal with this (I used to sit near one of them).