Premium SMS scam

[andysmith1]

Bit of a rant incoming... 

A few days ago after visiting a site on my phone I was confronted with a barrage of pop-up ads which were swiftly closed. I then received the following SMS messages: 

Sender: Receipt

Message: FreeMsg: Thank you for subscribing to globalcams.world for £4.50 a week until you text STOP to 83463. HELP? 03300538665 

Sender: FreeMsg

Message: FreeMsg: Watch cams here http://source.globalcams.world/globalcams.php 

I, of course, text STOP to 83463. However, it was too late and I had already been charged the stated £4.50. 

I rang the number today and was told that I would not be charged again but as "the service was activated from the handset" they would not refund the charge. They repeated this over and over again when I pressed them for a refund. 

I spoke to o2 customer services who agreed to apply a credit to my account as a goodwill gesture. However, they said they were unable to reverse the charge or block any premium rate incoming SMS messages - they can only bar outgoing premium calls/messages. 

Two things about this absolutely stagger me: 

- o2 have clearly provided the means for this to happen. The only way a website would have been able to obtain my phone number is if o2 supplied it. I'm very interested in the technical side of this if anyone has any details? As far as I can tell o2 don't send any extra HTTP headers to all websites with any idetifying information. Perhaps just to pre-approved 'billing gateways'? However they have clearly arranged something with the company that scammed me using such 'dark patterns'. 

- There is apparently no way to block these charges. This is a lie - the network operators could easily block these charges if they want to. If I reported my debit card as lost to my bank, they would deny any attempted charges to it. Network operators could easily do this if they wanted to. 

One amusing thing to me is the actual content of the 'service' I apparently subscribed to for £4.50 a week. If you take a look it's just a bunch of embedded YouTube live streams i.e. absolutely nothing of value! 

[MI5]

I've no idea how they actually get your number but I'd always assumed that those pop ups interrogated the sim card to get the info required.
O2 won't respond to you on here. You'll need to raise a complaint to get a response from them, but I doubt any response would answer the question directly either.

[andysmith1]

As a software developer I can answer that with some authority - there is no way for a website to retrieve details like that from your phone or SIM card. The only possibility here is that o2 have injected these details into the web traffic between my phone and the receiving web server. Which is why I attribute a large amount of blame to o2 (and other network operators) for allowing these scams to exist. 

Can you recommend the best way of escalating this complaint? 

Thanks to everyone who has replied btw, much appreciated  

[jonsie]

https://www.o2.co.uk/how-to-complain

I always, wrongly now it seems, that if you clicked on a link say Facebook that your number is registered there and these sharks get the information from there. 

And yes I agree, 2 step authorisation should be implemented easily by networks. 

[MI5]

All official methods of complaint are here https://www.o2.co.uk/how-to-complain or you can send an email directly to the CEO's office.
Email address can be found on Google.

[jonsie]

I daren't even guess the number of emails he gets these days from disgruntled customers and we will keep pointing members there. 

[MI5]

If it was me, I'd want to know too tbh.

[Anonymous]

I’d definitely want to know what was going on in my company if it was me

[andysmith1]

Thanks again all, I have emailed Mark Evans. 

I don't really expect much of a response to this - I assume the amount of money mobile operators make with systems like these is a big disincentive to prevent this kind of billing or make it harder to exploit 😞  

[MI5]

The longer this goes on and the less we see networks trying to prevent it, makes me fully agree with you.

[PhoneChanger]

@andysmith1 there is also the possibility that the link you have selected has sent an SMS message from your phone to them in order for them to have your phone number and to charge you for this.