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The Cost Of Mobile Phones - Or Those SMS’s

This isn’t blogging related, but I felt like making a post about it so I chose this blog to do it on.

This post instead has to do with mobile phones and SMS.

A bit of background first - I have twin girls and both of them got a new mobile phone for Christmas. Due to a few different things (expense, out of stock etc) one ended up on Virgin the other on Telstra.

The daughter who scored the Telstra pre-paid phone got an initial $10 credit (and went for the bonus of free calls to 5 friends on Telstra.) Anyway, when they got the phones they knew they weren’t to get carried away making calls or sending text messages etc (though the one on Vodafone ended up with way more credit than she can possibly spend) and they’ve been told countless times not download ring tones etc (that whole fine print thing - they keep sending them and you keep paying for them even if you don’t want it stuff)

So, the initial Telstra credit actually ran out fairly quickly, even though my daughter assured me she hadn’t got carried away sending text messages etc - and I sort of agreed, and she’s been harping on at me to get her some more credit for a couple of weeks now. So yesterday, at about 1pm, I bit the bullet and got her another $30 credit while I was out shopping.

No sooner had we got home and she received a text message - she looked at it and said to me “what’s this?” it was some game thing where she had to goto the site to download it - I told her to delete it and never go into those sites cause it’ll cost her a fortune etc etc.

Today, she got another text message, some horoscope thing - mind you there were no other details with it - just the horoscope - I swore - she said she’d never signed up for anything like that - I told her to send a STOP message back to it and see what happens - she got a text message back saying it had been cancelled - two minutes later she got a standard message from Telstra saying she had less than $10 credit. She got pretty upset - I got wild and made a note of the number the sms had come from - not half an hour later she got another horoscope thingie message and checking her balance she was down to less than $2 credit. I’m now furious and wondering just what the hell I can do about it.

I rang Telstra pre-paid and explained what was going on - the lady I spoke to asked for the number the SMS had come from and asked me to go on hold while she got a support/contact number - after being on hold for I don’t know how long, I got frustrated (mind you I wasn’t in the best frame of mind to begin with) and hung up.

I quickly re-dialled and got through to a different person. I explained it all again, reminding the guy again that I couldn’t afford this crap and what the hell could I do about it etc etc - though I was speaking in a reasonable and patient voice (I always try to be nice - at least in the beginning of a phone call) he told me the only thing he could do was to change my daughters phone number and put a call barring on for those type of numbers. I said okay but first I wanted to know how I could go about finding out the details on how to contact these people and getting some sort of refund - she never subscribed and they’d pretty much cost her (me) $30 in 24hours. He asked for the number the SMS had come from so I gave it to him - he didn’t even put me on hold - well if he did I didn’t get the annoying music - he just fairly quickly came back and said that number is not in their database (I assume they have some sort of system that keeps track of these so called premium sms message services) so in that instance I was S.O.L

However he did offer me $20 credit once I changed my daughter’s mobile number and put the barring on so at least  in reality I’m only down 10 bucks.

What really annoys me though, and I guess is the whole point of this rambling post - that probably doesn’t make much sense - is that sometimes no matter what you do, these types of companies can still cost you and there’s sometimes not a thing you can do about it.

We (the kids and I) knew not to download ring tones, get games,  enter contests etc. yet somehow they still find a way. I was just doing some searching and came across some doosy ways they scam you that I never would have thought about: the missed call being one.

I guess I can never be 100% sure that she hadn’t somehow signed up for something - she tells me she didn’t (and I believe her) but there’s a chance she hit reply on something or when she first got the phone and was playing around in all those little added extras she may have done something etc - but even so, for that type of thing, like email subscriptions etc there should be some sort of double opt-in - where the provider ensures you actually want to subscribe and if you send stop - you should be unsubscribed.

Okay rant over  - back to more blog related stuff soon