Unwanted text service charging £3 a week.

Destination

Destination

Destination

Soldato
Joined
31 May 2009
Posts
21,468
I have just found out my mother has been receiving a text each week which charges her £3 a week for a subscription to a service she never requested. My mother only ever texts myself and my sister and hasn't ever used a competition entry or any such text to win style entry.
She has been receiving texts from 82024 and she was deleting them assuming them to be advertisig spam or spam which would cost money to reply to. It appears the company have signed her to their listing without her permission.

From checking whocallsme, it would seem this is happening quite a bit to many people. O2 have advised to text STOP, then to call the company and request the money back. Similar rubbish appears to have been seen by 82023.

Anyone else had a similar situation? Any luck getting a refund?
 
This happened to me when I was younger, got to the point where it trained my moneyy (pay as go) luckily at the time I had free texts a day for life, so survived off them. I tried STOP various times myself.
I soon manned up and told my dad and he threatened them and got a nice cheque in the post.
 
The service provider should give you a refund - if they've genuinely been sending these texts without your mother opting in by texting in they can get fined quite a lot.

Check the regulators website here and it should provide you with the service providers contact details.

You might want to complain to PhonepayPlus as well if you want to take things further. Good luck
 
Further investigations suggest contacting the company ergo2 results in being given a premium rate number to call to ask for a refund, and then refunds not arriving.
Additionally one forum suggested the same company was already fined for the same practice in 2009, so I guess it has become profitable to cheat as the fine must not have been severe enough.

Will contact the regulator. Thanks.
 
Texting 'STOP' should work. I have a vaguely amusing story relating to this...

I was driving in the car with my Dad listening to radio 1. They were asking to text in funny youtube videos. I went to text in the powerthirst video, but couldn't remember the number, so asked me dad for it and sent it off. Then I realised I spelled powerthirst wrong, so text the same number again.

5 minutes later I recieved a text message along the lines of 'heya big boy... I think you meant to text the radio... text me again if you want to talk ;)'. I read the text out loud to my dad. He replied:

"Haha, unlucky! Feel glad you didn't text in twice :D"
"Haha... yeah... oooh **** :eek:"

Instantly got another sexy text and got them about every 2 hours. I had absolutely no idea what to do. Eventually I phoned up O2 customer services and explained the situation... I thought I'd just tell them the story and have a good laugh with the person at O2. Their response was deadly serious - just text 'STOP'. I have the feeling the girl who was instructing me didn't believe me and thought I was just a skanky pervy man :o

It ended up costing me about £20. The moral of the story - never ask Dad for a phone number to text. He is always wrong.
 
I work for customer services for a mobile phone company, so I get this kinda call a lot. Shes probably signed up to something without realising it. Maybe over the phone, via text, in a magazine, online or possibly from a mailing list that some other company has sold on.

Texting STOP to the number should stop it. It legally obliges the company to stop sending the texts within a maximum of 24 hours.

As for getting a refund, that really depends on your luck. Some of these companies are well dodgy and some are totally legit. But you'd still have to prove that you didnt want the services they were providing and didnt do anything to sign up for them.
 
Why doesn't the company have to prove that you did want the services?

Like most other services.
 
i had the same once. Each text cost me £1.50 and i never signed up to anything. I tried the usual STOP text but when that didn't work, i phones O2 and got the number blocked, claiming they were a fraudulent company (which hopefully would have prompted them to take notice of them bothering other customers). I never tried for a refund though.
 
This is the one thing that annoys me more than anything about chargeable text messages. In any other medium, your response to spam is to ignore it. Snail mail - throw it away. Email - delete it. Under no circumstances would (or should) you reply to an unknown sender and ask them to stop sending you unsolicited messages - it alerts them to the fact that you exist.

So why require a 'text stop' without having had a 'text start' equivalent in the first place?
 
yer_averagejoe said:
i had the same once. Each text cost me £1.50 and i never signed up to anything. I tried the usual STOP text but when that didn't work, i phones O2 and got the number blocked, claiming they were a fraudulent company (which hopefully would have prompted them to take notice of them bothering other customers). I never tried for a refund though.
Click to expand...

My phone got robbed and they called multiple porn numbers while I was in the process of getting the sim card blocked. I now receive spam texts all the stinking time; can't text stop to the number as the number doesn't receive texts and when I asked O2 they said they can't block numbers? =\

Any idea how to stop it?
 
Bloodshot said:
Can O2 actually block numbers? If they can, why do they claim they can't?
Click to expand...

They can add a premium bar to the number, it means you can neither send nor receive texts to or from premium numbers.
O2 are allegedly currently investigating how my mother managed to be sent what now turns out to be £40 of texts from this number whilst a premium bar was active.

The regulator has been informed and I have made a complaint as suggested above, but I think I will have to go to OfTel as well, and then just for giggles probably watchdog, as clearly when the same company was fined £140,000 in July 2009 for doing the same thing, if they're still at it, they're making enough to make the fines a business expense.

I agree with the comments regarding premium spam, autosubscription shouldn't occur. Every other piece of junk you can throw in the bin, junk texts cost money and you have to act to stop them, unfair on non-technically minded folks.
 
Little update.
The ombudsman called yesterday, went over the situation, and has stated a full refund should appear on next months billing statement.

Very swift service, quite impressed with this.
 
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