Unsolicited Text Messages

stickywicket

My daughter has a contact phone. For the past 5 months she has received unwanted texts from companies on Fridays and Saturdays which come to £12 a month from 4 different 5 digit numbers. They do not respond to STOP. She wants them to stop and to claim her money back but the phone company say they cannot do anything. She is paying for these messages and she is not opening them up. She has not subscribed to them. What can she do? Are these in breach of The Human Rights Act? Any advice would be welcome. Thanks Stickywicket

JAYMARSH2005

Have u got the numbers the messages are being sent from ? Something can be done about it

billsavings

Complain to http://www.phonepayplus.org.uk/consumers/complain/default.asp

stickywicket

Thanks. First I am going to complain to 3 shop who give a very poor shop service, to give them the opportunity to refund me. Then I will go to phone +. What a breach of trust with my direct debit. I should not be paying for unwanted texts.

phoenixbbs

In particular this thread - they've got a large base of users posting info about who is behind the spam messages:

(edit, I put the wrong url in, apologies for the length of it ! - the newest posts are on page 1)
http://www.grumbletext.co.uk/vt.php?t=333&postdays=0&postorder=desc&subj=complaints++SMS+Spam+(General)+complaint&start=0

If 3 can't prove she *did* sign up to these services, she may have a valid claim against them as they're facilitating theft.

The spam companies themselves often try to use the excuse that she must have signed up via a website - complete crap, and it would fail under the requirements of the Data Protection Act.

If they try this, tell them you require them to retain the logfiles, as you will be calling upon them as evidence in a small claims action to recover all stolen funds and costs - destruction of their only "evidence" if such exists will destroy their case.

Ask whose name they want putting on the paperwork, and ask for the full name and address of the person you get to speak to as you're including them on the paperwork.

Really speaking, this *should* be a police matter, but the theft of small amounts from a lot of people seems to confuse the fact that it is still theft.

In the meantime, it might be worth contacting your MP to push for new legislation to limit the number of chargeable messages that can be sent before you need to re-subscribe, and to make the network operators responsible for any refunds where they can't prove the user subscribed.

MRS_TO_BE_2

rang up yesterday on 191 and had this applied to my vodafone account...

fwor

MRS_TO_BE wrote: »

rang up yesterday on 191 and had this applied to my vodafone account...

Good to know it works sometimes but... prepare to be persistent!

I called earlier today on 191 and the person that I spoke to insisted that it was still not possible to do this. Unfortunately I had not read this thread then, so I didn't know any better. Oh well, yet another 25p call to 191 to get them to do what they should have done last time round...

MRS_TO_BE_2

yes sadly although vodafone are a communications company they seem to be lacking in the ability to communicate all this to their customer service team!!

Glad you got it sorted eventually!

fwor

I've not quite got it sorted yet, as I want to get my £1.50 back.

Although I've raised a formal complaint with what I think used to be called ICSTIS, I'm also going to write to Ofcom, because their regulatory control of this aspect of the mobile phone industry has been pathetically weak.

I'm raising the following question in my letter to them:

"Why has the mobile phone industry been allowed by Ofcom to operate a system which permits scammers (in this case ***** Mobile) to simply take money from me in this way? They have no contract or agreement with me, nor any relationship with me at all, and yet the mobile phone billing system lets them do it."

I don't have any expectation that the "regulator" will give me a satisfactory response.

gozza

my 12 year old daughter just been scammed by £9 and orange said they couldnt stop it. im scared to put money on her phone now ive texted Stop all to the company involved but im well peed off. im joining T-Mobile at first oppotunity seems Orange enjoy making a profit from these calls. its so unfair.