Complaints about premium rate telephone services in the UK has dropped by over half in a year. One of the reasons for this is that companies that break the rules are likely to be fined more heavily.
Complaints to the UK premium rate telephone regulator PhonepayPlus for the last three months of 2009 were down 61% on the previous year. But figures for the first half of last year show that fines were not dropping by the same proportion, meaning that individual fines are likely to be rising year on year.
Premium rate telephone services were the subject of 5,442 complaints in the last three months of 2008 and of just 2,132 complaints in the same period of 2009. That represents a fall in complaint numbers of 61%.
In the first half of 2008 operators were fined £310,773, while fines totalled £291,388 for the same period in 2009, the latest period for which figures are available, a drop of just 6%.
Though those figures cover slightly different periods, they indicate that fewer complaints are receiving larger fines.
Mobile phone services account for the bulk of complaints. In the last three months of last year mobile complaints accounted for 89% of the total.
Complaints about premium rate services on mobile phones reached a peak in July 2008, at which point the European Commission conducted a study and found that four in five of the websites selling premium mobile services breached consumer protection laws.
Figures released by Phonepayplus last autumn showed that in the 15 months following the study premium rate mobile services complaints dropped by 62%.
The continuing fall is likely to be connected to a tightening of the regulation of premium rate mobile services in the past year. In January 2008 Phonepayplus introduced a new regime aimed at making consumers better informed about the charges they were signing up for.
“Any consumer joining a subscription service which costs more than £4.50 per week must first receive a free confirmation text message detailing the cost and conditions of the service. The consumer cannot be charged until they have confirmed their subscription by replying to that text,” under the new rules.
The European Commission contacted those websites that had problems and it said that 15 months from the date of its investigation 159 of the 301 websites that were problematic had changed the way they operated and 54 had closed.
Phonepayplus closely analysed 10% of the complaint calls that came to it in the last three months of 2009 and found that WAP services accounted for 24% of them, adult chat and dating accounts for 16% and wallpaper and ringtone services for 12%.
For full details of the phonepayplus repport – click here.