The UK's PhonepayPlus (previously known as ICSTIS) has introduced new regulations to clamp down on cheating premium telephony service providers, but the chances that the dodgy dealers will just treat the new regs as obstacles and swerve around them.
If you were called ICSTIS you'd probably want to change your name on the basis that it makes you sound like an unpleasant medical condition. Whether you'd go to the other extreme and call yourself PhonepayPlus, which sounds like a fun site for teen mobile phone users, is debatable though.
Perhaps the UK's premium service telephony regulator should call itself ICSTIS when it's feeling mean and punchy and PhonepayPlus when it's feeling cuddly and industry-friendly.
And on that basis it's difficult to decide which name it should have adopted for this week's announcement of new measures to clamp down on 'Phonepay' cheating by rogue elements within the service provider community. The figures on complaints from the UK public appear to show a growing tide of bad commercial behaviour with the regulator's own figures showing a 108 per cent rise in complaints last year alone.
At worst the bad practise involves tricking people into phoning numbers which then levy them with huge charges, at 'best' it involves being somewhat laissez-faire over terms and conditions - burying critical data in the small print, automatically renewing subscriptions as a default and all that sort of trickery.
It's always seemed incredible that this practise be allowed to thrive without something draconian being done to stop it.
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