Wish You Were Here

Many readers would know of my past involement in the regulation of Premium Rate services industry and my belief that solid regulation and active administration is vital to consumer protection.

With the exception of a few providers, Premium Rate SMS services in Australia has been taken over by scammers targetting unspecting mobile users with unfair subscription services.

Subscrition Premium charged SMS services should be banned. There is no valid use for the services other than making money for the service providers and the Telco’s. They should have never been introduced in the first place and still years later are causing the same level of concerns as they did in the past.

The lack of proactive regulation of SMS services is a joke. Proactive consumer protection has dissapered and is no longer important. The regime is focused on reactive management which allows scams to run for months before being acted upon.

Listen to any radio station, they all use 19 numbers to promote feedback from listners, now ask yourself, what is the cost for sending those messages to the station. I bet you don’t know and neither do I, because the listner is not told!

Now if that was a 1900 number you had to call, the cost message would have to be read out on air, but the inconsistency is that with SMS services the consumer protection measures are almost non existant.

We could at least take a leaf out of a proactive UK regulation regime who consistently improve their levels of proactive consumer protection.