Grumbletext, UK consumer complaints

Unfortunately, this page has been discontinued...

Grumbletext set up this page in January 2005 to help ensure that premium rate text services were complying with the new universal 'STOP' command, which the mobile operators had brought in to make sure that it was in theory fairly straightforward for consumers to cancel 'subscriptions' to premium rate texting services (e.g. ringtones).

This page provided a means for you to report situations where you had sent STOP to a premium rate text service and it hadn't worked. The first thing to say is that I at any rate am convinced that several months later, the majority of these services do finally react properly to the STOP command - however, some still don't and they can still cause consumers a major and expensive headache.

The mobile networks have now agreed on further measures, all of which in principle we welcome - what now remains to be seen is how effectively they are policed. Hopefully the new rules will make it even harder for rogue services to deliberately break the rules and get away with it.

However, the case remains that we were only able to offer this STOP non-compliance reporting facility with the co-operation of the mobile phone networks. Gradually the majority of them (bar Virgin Mobile) have decided that they no longer wish to participate in responding to their customer's complaints through this page. The main reasons given to us have been variously as follows:

1) they believe they have now successfully trained their own call centre staff to deal effectively with problems associated with premium rate text messaging

2) whilst they were still receiving STOP non-compliance reports from this page, their experience was that in the majority of cases, certainly latterly, further investigation tended to show that either:

- the messages complained about weren't charged for, sometimes because they were marketing messages, sometimes because they were the very message confirming that the STOP command had worked and the subscription had been cancelled, or

- that there was no apparent evidence that the customer had sent a STOP command

In any case, the upshot is that unfortunately we can't offer this service anymore.

IF you have sent STOP or STOP ALL to a 5 digit premium rate text number and you are certain that it is continuing to send you texts which you are being charged to receive, then - please - you MUST try and post on the forum to tell us and other consumers. Where we see such reports Grumbletext will itself sign up to the service and then attempt to stop it - if we can't STOP a particular service, then we have something up our sleave (for the next few weeks at least) which could make life pretty uncomfortable for whichever 'service provider' is responsible.

To report 5 digit texting services which are NOT responding to STOP or STOP ALL, please click here to go to our main premium rate forum to post your message - please include as much detail as possible (but not any of your personal contact details).

The more you post, the more other consumer with the same problems will find us, the more information everyone posts to deal with particular problems, the more likely you are to get a result.

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