When the txts just won’t stop coming
Rating: Is it stop, STOP or STOP ALL?
I’ve just been battling a particular UK content provider, Tanla Mobile, and the whole experience illustrates just how dangerous self-regulation is for this industry. It appears that nothing can stop this particular provider sending premium rate text messages out to me.
The regulator, Phonepayplus, has to make its mind up as to what exactly the industry standard ‘cease and desist’ command needs to be.
Until now I’d laboured under the belief that if you took a particular shortcode and send the message ’stop’ to it, then the premium rate messages should stop arriving.
Apparently, that’s just not the case. For starters, there appears to be a clear division among suppliers over whether the word stop itself needs to be in upper or lower case. But, while personally going through the official Phonepaylus complaints procedure, I discovered that the ‘desist’ command in this particular instance was actually neither but ‘STOP ALL’.
You might be thinking that I’m some sort of pedant but computers are notoriously unforgiving. I know of at least one consumer who was under the impression that ’stop sending’ would work. It didn’t. Sending ’stop’ on its own did, however.
The worse part of this whole chaos is getting a refund. It turns out that while Phonepayplus can impose all sorts of penalties on miscreants, it doesn’t actually have the power to force refunds.
In truth, Phonepayplus should be able to refund monies to unfortunate consumers and then reclaim the money from errant content providers. That would probably need some kind of bond similar to the one the travel industry levied on its participants.
What really irks is that I’m pretty convinced I never feel for the bait in the first place and that I’ve never actually knowingly subscribed to the service in question. Just try proving it.
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