Watchdog relieves iPhone 5 scammers of £10k

Thanks for the heads up, this looks worth it

More reassurance scams work under this "government".

"PhonePayPlus estimated that the scammers made between £50,000 and £100,000 out of the service. As well as the £10,000 fine..." Min profit £40k, possible £90k? Lemme guess, there's a tory minister sitting on the PPS board, Wonga-style.

Bah, they'll just declare bankrupcy and re-open a new business called honeybee or something.

People who run scam businesses should be blacklisted, yo bankrupt a business you aren't allowed to open one for another 10 years.

Of course then they'd just get their wives / partners / close friends to open the new one for them.

Not sure if profitable or not

For every £1 premium rate SMS billed to a customer, the service supplier may only receive 80p at the most. Then there is the charge for the shortcode, typically £250 to £500 per month.

They have to refund all punters, so if they had billed £100,000 of charges which need refunding, that means they need to find a possible extra £20,000 to cover the shortfall. Plus the £10,000 PhonePayPlus fine, plus administration costs for someone to write an awful lot of cheques.. If's possible that the aggregator that sits between Mobile Minded BV and the networks may withhold outpayments which means even more of their own cash they need to find from their own pockets. The only winners here are the mobile networks who get to keep all the revenue.

You'd be surprised how unpleasant this can be for Mobile Minded BV, and quite rightly so.. It will either eat their profits from any legitimate revenue they made (if any), and they could even look to liquidate meaning customers may still lose out.

Greed is not so good.

As the saying goes: A fool and his money are easily parted.

A hundred and fifty quid of Morrisons vouchers? Mor___ons?

A free iPhone 5? Before they are available? Click?

It is usually only people's greed that gets them into these scams, another saying is: if a deal is too good to be true then it usually is.

I have been offered many of these scams in my time and my common sense has ensured that my money has stayed firmly in my pocket and I end up amazed that people fall for them. </rant>

I do agree though with Lui-g that the owners of said businesses should be named and shamed.

.......and yet no disqualification for those involved in the scam from working in the premium rate industry in ANY capacity - which should be a default penalty. Moreover there should be a duty on the operator of the short-code/ premium rate number to ensure that such facilities are not abused. I became really sick of seeing the same "short-code network" being behind various scams a couple of years back - clearly the operator was creaming in the revenue whilst claiming hand on heart that it was their wicked wicked customers that were dragging the company into disrepute.

This sort of thing is surely a basic criminal fraud... yet we see no European arrest warrants being issues to haul the perpetrators into our courts, a bit different to guys who set up sites that offer links to Tv shows... I guess the key is here its the public that are suffering a real financial loss due to fraud rather than some media company that loses some theoretical income from old shows (which they were already paid for on first run... second run... then on Dave... then on ...... Just proves again that the UK Government serves only the interests of business - even when they blatantly defraud the public.

If you are going to run with dogs you will get fleas.... maybe it would help them be a little more selective about their clientèle rather than just creaming off the revenue derived from the scams ran on their facilities that they turn a blind eye to.

Just close down the whole miserable premium rate sms mess... the industry itself seems largely unconcerned , the regulator is largely ineffective... so just close down this unproductive waste of resource and utlitiy

the gullible elephant in the room

see? there *are* ways to make money from FB.

mine's the one with the pre-packed administration and fsck-the-creditors kit in the pocket.

£10 a week to receive messages?

The suckers should be fined another £10 a week for being so gullible.

Phonepayplus != "regulator"

It's a trade association, funded by the premium rate industry and finally delegated a tiny amount of authority by Ofcom 2-3 years ago.

It was originally setup by BT to avoid government intervention in the premium rate industry and its sole reason for continuing to exist is to shield the industry from government.

It claimed to be a regulator a LONG time before it had any regulatory authority - and it has no power to do any of the stuff people are demanding - the scammers are more than capable of sticking up 2 fingers to PPP and all PPP can do is refer it to Ofcom.

For similar rorts, see "Advertising Srandards Authority" (another trade association)