avoid Boltblue: mobile phone site drains all my PAYG credit

RadoJo

There seems to be some discrepancy about the Ts and Cs available on the main site, and those displayed on the Google landing page, even though the link calls them 'Full Terms and Conditions' as those make no mention of the £15 set up charge (unless my mid week lull has made me miss it!):

Terms and conditions

Boltblue Club is a subscription service that will cost you £4.50 per week until you send STOP to 85233. New members will receive a complimentary download, text message allowance or mobile alerts allowance when they join without any deduction from their credit. You can then use your credit to download ringtones, mobile videos, wallpapers, logos and picture messages, and sent PC to mobile text messages and receive mobile alerts, all at a discounted rate. Credit is accumulated to a maximum value of £18.00. Choose from over 35,000 downloads. To request your Club balance, just send the text BAL to 85233. You must be 16 or over in age and have permission from the bill-payer. Standard operator WAP, GPRS and SMS costs apply. Please make sure that your phone is compatible. Pre-pay users ensure you have enough credit to receive texts. Orders usually take a few minutes to arrive but delays can be caused by network congestion so please allow up to 24hrs for delivery. Some items may cost more than a single credit to consume, like full tracks realtones, funtones, nametones and mobile videos. All fees, including fees for existing subscription contracts, are subject to change upon notice from Boltblue. Boltblue will provide you with reasonable notice of such change. If you do not accept the new fees, you may cancel your subscription as detailed above. If you download mobile entertainment content in excess of the amount allowed by your subscription contract, then you agree to pay the applicable Boltblue retail rates for such additional downloads. Boltblue reserves the right to offer from time to time and at their discretion 1 weeks free subscription to new subscribers. This will be a promotional offer which will be linked to certain marketing campaigns for certain Boltblue services and will be applicable only to subscribers that subscribe to the Boltblue service during the period of the promotional offer. Boltblue can withdraw the promotional offer at any time without prior notice of any kind. You may receive info/offers from Boltblue. If you do not wish to receive these offers you may opt-out by writing to us or replying to any marketing message that you may receive. You can contact us by calling Customer Services on 0870 020 9312 or emailing [EMAIL="help@boltblue.com"]help@boltblue.com[/EMAIL].

In which case I would suggest that you take a screen grab of the page you viewed, and the Ts and Cs and see if you can use that against them.

There seem to be two separate issues - whether you did in fact sign up, and the difference in terms and conditions depending on which part of the site you visit. I would say that the difference in Ts and Cs is probably your best bet as that is what has caused you the £15 charge, and if you can't prove that you didn't officially sign up, then you can at least prove that you were not given the full details of the service anyway.
Good luck - let us know how it goes!

pigeonpie

thanks - sorry about the ranting, just I was pretty upset. £15 is a lot right now.
I still can't use my phone and may have to change my number. I hope that no-one else gets caught out, but if they do PLEASE report it to PPP.
I'll try another email using your info RadoJo to BB later today and see if I get any reply.

LilMissEmmylou

as its a pay as u go... why not say its your daughters or sons mobile and they are 14? therefore they couldn't legally enter the contract?

eyelinerprincess

pigeonpie wrote: »

....and just where does it say that the mere act of entering your mobile phone no (which you have to do to even look at the website) is sufficient to enable them to consider you a paid up PAYG customer?! (or subscriber).

I was following the link on RadoJo's post, searched for the free ringtones and didn't get BoltBlue as a sponsored link, therefore could not find the link that you had entered your number into. I would assume, though, that they should state the T&C on the page (was it one like this one: http://www.boltblue.com/specialoffer/19/?c=googleuk105sb&gclid=CMGGqOHc-pACFQ6hQwodeiS31g )? As that's the only way I can see that you can enter your number in without going through the signup page on Bolt Blue.

tincat

Regardless of whether the OP entered a pin or read the T&C, this is a truly evil site. As others have said, what is to stop people entering all their enemies phone numbers. Many people may not even check their statements, and £15 or £4.50 won't register for months, and they're being charged for rubbish. (Although when they start getting the texts at least that should be a warning to check).

I searched for free ringtones, and they were the 1st at the top.

They also have their disclaimer in a lighter blue on a dark blue background, and while many of us can see it, many people won't.

They do not indicate that by entering your number you are registering. The only thing they have is some hard to read text under the pic of the mobile saying join for £4.50 per week. On first look that text looks like a funky squiggle.

Also their google ad clearly says 100% free ringtones, and is therefore not just misleading, but an outrageous lie. You shouldn't be able to claim anything you like just to get people to click on your link.

By seeing the 100% free advert, you wouldn't even bother to look at the disclaimer at the bottom, as you already think that the site will never charge you for ringtones, let alone just for browsing the site, so why would a disclaimer apply as you are thinking it should be free. I know that sounds unsavvy, but if you go and browse M&S site or any other site, you wouldn't even think of looking at their T&C until you had chosen something to buy and gone through to their checkout.

I really think that this site should be shut down. The very fact that the CS the OP talked to said there is no way to prove who entered the number is enough for me.
_________________________________________________________________________

tincat

It occurs to me that there is something we could do as I used to do a bit of google adwords and adsense. Google has a way of detecting if people are clicking on their link but then not following through by making a purchase or in this case registering.

If we all keep googling 'free ringtones' and then clicking on the boltblue link and then closing the page down, google will pick up that there are many suspicious clicks to that site. If we all did this once or twice per day it would make a big impact to their numbers.

They will then flag the site for review and then probably disable the ads as they will see how misleading the page is. I can't remember exactly but I think that there are rules restricting advertisers from directing the ads to a page which requires a registration like this one.

When they start up a new ad campaign, we can just google search 'boltblue' and it will probably come up. By clicking on their link once or twice per day, it will again flag up as suspicious.

It will only work on the paid for listings though, so don't bother doing it if boltblue comes up in the natural searches.

RadoJo

The only problem is that Google may see a heightened number of clicks as click fraud, of which the site would be a victim rather than being penalised. Repeatedly clicking links such as this is shady practice undertaken by rival companies sometimes as it costs the company every time you click on the ad. However, Google do have rules about having the word 'Free' in your ads, which state that you have to provide proof of what is 'free' within two pages of the landing page that the ad takes you to. From what I can gather, there is no free product - you can only access any of it by entering your number and paying this £15.
Either way, I am not sure whether Google would be able to act - you could contact them (they are very nice - can you tell that I use Google a lot?) but really I think that Ofcom would be a better bet as I believe they are hotting up on these kind of 'subscription' sites and would at least be able to tell you what you can do.

Anetares

The disclaimer may be sly in blue text, but even the size of the "4" in £4.50 in the graffiti style tag makes it hard to discern what's really going on.. I thought it was a "1" to begin with :rolleyes:

I think RadoJo has a point, maybe the OP can report it to Google and Ofcom, or which ever body best deals with these things.

It says you must be 16+ to use this "service".. surely if all you have to do to "subscribe" is enter your mobile number, they are not enforcing any way of verifying the users age, i.e. like some subscription email newsletters will where you have to fill in details of your age.. Make a declaration. Isn't there some obligation to verify the age?

eyelinerprincess

Reiterating what I said before, the disclaimer at the bottom of the page DOES state that you will be charged £15 for entering your number. And the text isn't that hard to read.

tincat

eyelinerprincess wrote: »

Reiterating what I said before, the disclaimer at the bottom of the page DOES state that you will be charged £15 for entering your number. And the text isn't that hard to read.

Boltblue Club is a weekly subscription service with an introductory first download at no extra cost when you join for £4.50/week until you send STOP to 85233. As a member you will get up to 9 downloads and up to 90 PC to mobile SMS each week. You must be 16+ years of age or have bill payers permission, standard operator SMS (sent by the user) and WAP/GPRS/UMTS charges apply. Full terms

This is their disclaimer. Where does it say that you will have to pay a minimum of £15?

All it mentions is a weekly charge of £4.50, and says you can stop at any time - it doesn't mention any lock in period which would justify the £15 or am I reading a different disclaimer to you?

Where does it warn you that just by entering your phone number you are agreeing to their T&C's?

Where does it ask you to confirm that you are 16+ years of age?

And again, if your number is entered by someone else? What recourse is there?

Can you really say that all of these issues are addressed by their landing page?