Premium SMS scams

On the day the mobile phone industry celebrates the 15th birthday of the SMS, we find a premium rate SMS operator is fined $150,000 for spamming phone users.

This scam was an irritating little stunt where they'd call you and quickly hang up, leaving an "unanswered call" on your phone. When you returned the call you'd get a recorded message telling you that you'd won a prize and to call a premium rate phone number.

If you fell for this, you would then find that not only had you spent $15 to claim your prize, but also you'd subscribed to a pointless and expensive ringtone service.

DC Marketing is not alone in this sort of behaviour. In fact there are many operators who are far worse.

The attitude of the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association is laughable. The chief executive, Chris Althaus, believes that 9,000 complaints in a six month period is simply because of new 3G services.

Exactly what 3G has to do with SMS scams is beyond me.

The ringtone and premium rate SMS industry has a serious problem. There's only so many morons who will spend hundreds of dollars a year on this garbage. By definition, those morons are easily parted from their money so competition for them is intense.

So the premium rate operators stoop to some pretty low stunts to trick people. One of the most common tricks is to offer a prize but bury deep in the small print that claiming it is agreeing to receiving two ring tones a week at five dollars a pop.

The worse ones just subscribe people who have never even rung the number. The first these people know of the scam is some charges on their bill.

Many victims of this found the response of Optus, Telstra and Vodafone was "discuss it with the spammer" despite the fact the victims often had no relationship with them and the scammers made it difficult, if not impossible, to talk to anyone.

The real disgrace here is the action was taken against one provider under the spam act. The real scammers should be feeling the heat of the ACCC, TIO and state police forces for the frauds that have been committed.

The phone companies should be copping some penalties too. They are complicit in this and profit very nicely from these scams.

Until the authorities start taking serious action, the premium rate SMS scams will continue.

Anyway, happy birthday to the SMS.