Comments on: Clean up the premium rate SMS industry

By: Gary

Gary — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 09:09:26 +0000

Hi Datesh,
Thanks for your comment but I’m not sure we’re the right people to voice your concerns towards.

The reasons we don’t offer premium rate SMS is because financially it’s low margin and very high on admin costs, and the majority of the clients involved are in either the adult (like yourself) or the gambling industries. We simply don’t want a business that is focused on these areas. I think you may struggle to find an alternate supplier because may of our competitors take a similar view.

That said, your experience of a supplier failing to operate a suitable technical service and not paying you doesn’t sound like a good experience.

My advice to you is this; use the company who charge “far too much money”. They are probably well established, reliable, and will pay you. You might earn less in the short run but you’ll get a service that works and paid when you’re supposed to get paid, in the long run you’ll earn more. If you selected the last company on price then maybe (if you’ll excuse me) you’re paying the price.

What was that Stella Artois strap line…”reassuringly expensive”.

By: datesh kay

datesh kay — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 20:33:39 +0000

I agree with the above comments. I am a premium rate sms advertiser, I buy services from premium rate suppliers. I am always careful advertising and make sure to put all the relevant t and c’s in place. My last supplier was a bit bogus, I must say. I wasn’t paid for messages, trying from my own phone messages went unanswered. I am now looking for another supplier who is more reliable. Could anyone help? I am trawling the internet looking for sms providers, but they either don’t answer my emails, or they are charging far too much money.
I run a phone chat website, so my revenue has greatly reduced without my text chat service. These companies really must be raking it in! Good luck to them but make it legal!

By: Gary

Gary — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:53:09 +0000

A quick look at PPP’s acccounts shows trunover (fines) of £4.7m to March 09.

Bad debts (I think it fair to assume these are unpaid fines) of £585k.

So circa 12% of fines don’t get paid. Given outpayments should be held back when a service is being investigated 12% doesn’t look good.

They also had debtors of £880k at 31st March 09. Lets hope this lot gets paid.

By: Julian Hucker

Julian Hucker — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 14:41:08 +0000

We too have discussed similar issues. In theory the fines should be a deterrent. Clearly they are not.

This could either be because, as you say Gary, they still don’t take all all the available profit. Alternatively they may not be collected. I’d be interested to hear whether anyone has any information on outstanding PPP fines – I’ve been unable to source the information directly.

By: Stephen Williams

Stephen Williams — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:41:24 +0000

I couldn’t agree more. We have been blogging on this for a few months. http://www.aqa.63336.com/blog/category/mobile-regulation/

I am coming round to the view that PhonePayPlus should be adopting a zero tolerance strategy and imposing appropriately tough sanctions on all parts of the supply chain.

Another question is how effective PhonePayPlus fines are in preventing undesired behaviour. In many cases the recipient of a fine that makes a habit of breaking the rules can just quietly fold up their company, not pay the fine and come back to life again as a new entity and carry on behaving badly. This is often alluded to in PhonePyPlus rulings and is evidenced by the lack of collection of fines.