$8,000 Bill for Premium Text Messages

[DennyCrane]

A mentally disabled teenager in BC received an $8,000 bill from Koodo for premium text messages sent and received from a dating site, youtext.com. At first Koodo declined to reverse any of the charges, but they've since changed their stance and have decided to forgive the entire balance.

Typically I would say that it's the dating site the customer needs to go after for recourse, but I also see the customer point of view that they specifically requested a $500 spending cap that did not work in this situation. Personally I wish they would shut all these premium SMS guys down. No one in their right mind wants to pay $1.99 a day (indefinitely) for ringtones, nor would they knowingly spend $8,000 to text someone on a dating site. But that's just my two cents.

http://video.msn.com?vid=cbcc2012-07...yer_en-ca_news

[Mr Mystery]

A mentally disabled teenager in BC received an $8,000 bill from Koodo for premium text messages sent and received from a dating site, youtext.com. At first Koodo declined to reverse any of the charges, but they've since changed their stance and have decided to forgive the entire balance.

Typically I would say that it's the dating site the customer needs to go after for recourse, but I also see the customer point of view that they specifically requested a $500 spending cap that did not work in this situation. Personally I wish they would shut all these premium SMS guys down. No one in their right mind wants to pay $1.99 a day (indefinitely) for ringtones, nor would they knowingly spend $8,000 to text someone on a dating site. But that's just my two cents.

http://video.msn.com?vid=cbcc2012-07...yer_en-ca_news

Ya I don't get the premium text thing either. Just ban it and be done with it.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using HowardForums

[WorldIRC]

Mental ability of the teenager is irrelevant.

[DennyCrane]

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry Bold 9900: Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9900; en) AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.1.0.190 Mobile Safari/534.11+)

Mental ability of the teenager is irrelevant.

Agreed. But the press thinks they can get a few more sympathy votes that way.

[Jabb]

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry Bold 9900: Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9900; en) AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.1.0.190 Mobile Safari/534.11+)
Agreed. But the press thinks they can get a few more sympathy votes that way.

Agreed x 2

[g00gler]

When watching the news segment I did noticed that they said they were working on a way to block premium messages, so hopefully that happens sooner than later.

[Pisidan]

This happened to me on Rogers except it was only 13.00 dollars and when i called Rogers they were able to put a 3rd person txt block on so none of my lines can get charged. Im figuring Koodoo will probably do the samething now!

[shirsc2]

Yes, most people don't realize they have been hit with a premium text charge until months down the road. This is why everyone needs to monitor their cell phone bill every month to make sure all charges are legitimate.

If you have no need for premium text messaging, tell your carrier to block Premium SMS on your account. Hopefully this helps.

[dajs]

If some people want to pay $$$ for a bogus message, let them. However, these services need to be blocked by default on all Canadian phones. Only if a customer expressively requests that such services are activated and a credit limit is put in place, only then charging for them should be allowed.

[jattdesi]

^Cell Phone companies get a cut out of it, so cell phone companies will never block them. Remember if they can slip an extra few $ to your bill multiply that by million of clients = a lot of revenue and not everyone calls in to have the bills adjusted.

[dajs]

I know. Hence it has to be in the law.

Some European countries have introduced laws like this. As a result, fraud has gone down a lot.