Mobile App Developer Fined for Unauthorised Premium Rate SMS Charges

Published on: 24th May 2012

­A firm that offered fake versions of popular mobile games, including a variant of the Angry Bird franchise has been fined £50,000 (US$78,650) by the UK's premium rate telephony regulator.

The regulator said that it had received a number of complaints late last year about unauthorised charges being applied to their bills after they downloaded free games from the Android App Store.

The replica apps were developed to include coding, which triggered the sending of text messages from the users' handsets to a premium rate number which cost the user £5 per message.

The charges continued to be triggered until users uninstalled the replica app from their phone. The replica apps also appeared to restrict visibility of the incoming and outgoing messages associated with the premium rate shortcode, this resulted in complainants not being aware of the charges until they received their phone bills.

The apparently Latvia based company, A1 Agregator has also been ordered to refund all the customers for the unauthorised charges and will be subject to close monitoring the regulator for the next 12 months.

Google has removed the apps from the App Store.

 

Tags: [premium sms]  [phonepayplus]  [UK]