Consumers Association wants tougher controls on premium SMS

Stuart Corner
Monday, 23 February 2009 01:11

IT Industry - Market

Choice, The Australian Consumers Association, wants tougher action to reign in the promoters of ringtones, wallpapers and other services sold via premium SMS, including a double opti-in requirement and an external developed  independently monitored industry code.

Communications Alliance is developing a new code to replace the current Mobile Premium Services Industry Scheme and this will be mandatory when registered with ACMA. However this is not good enough for Choice. Policy & campaigns director, Gordon Renouf, told ITWire "We don't like the [Comms Alliance code development] process at all. The industry gets to write its own rules. We have been critical of the process for a long time."

He added: "We did a report in the middle of last year in which our basic premises was that there needed to be a more independent body responsible for developing industry codes with industry and consumer representation and thirdly that there needs to be adequate arrangements put in place to monitor and enforce these codes."

Choice's latest assault on the premium SMS industry  has been to release the results of a survey of 431 of its members saying that  nearly half had received one or more unsolicited [premium SMS service] messages. And two thirds of these unwilling customers were charged for it.

"Of those surveyed, 95 percent only subscribed to one service at one time and nearly all of those are no longer subscribing. Of those who did knowingly subscribe to a [mobile premium service], almost two thirds later experienced difficulty cancelling the service. Fifty percent of MPS customers surveyed reported either not knowing how to stop the subscription service, or said they attempted to cancel and received no response."

"It's a bit of a joke when so much of an industry's profits seem to depend on charging people for something they never asked for in the first place," Renouf said. "Such abysmal levels of customer service show this is an industry committed to quick profits, not customer care."

Release of the survey comes only days after the ACCC issued a press release bemoaning the fact that parts of the phone industry continue to engage in poor practices that frustrate consumers, despite a string of enforcement actions against the worst offenders.
Renouf said the proximity of the two announcements as co-incidental.  "We made a submission to Communications' Alliance's draft code and we undertook the survey and put that in as a supplementary submission. We thought it worthwhile making it more widely available and were going to do it last week, but then the Victorian bush fires dominated the news."

Choice's latest attack on premium SMS follows a damning indictment issued last November with the release of a report setting out is recommendation for a revision of the telecommunications regulatory regime as it applies to consumers.

CONTINUED