The Wireless Application Service Providers’ Association (Waspa), a body that regulates companies that provide value-added services to mobile consumers, has suspended one of its members, Infobip Africa, for allegedly adding people without their permission to a subscription service that contains adult content.
Waspa has described Infobip Africa’s alleged behaviour as “cynical and criminal” and moved quickly to suspend the company’s membership of the organisation.
A panel of three adjudicators, made up of lawyers, who are all independent of Waspa, reviewed the complaint and information provided to determine if there is any breach of the association’s code of conduct.
Infobip could not immediately be reached for comment after hours on Thursday.
Waspa received complaints of a potential case of “auto-subscription”, where a consumer is added to a paid-for service without asking or consenting to it.
A third-party expert was brought in by Waspa to test the service and to produce a report. The expert found that a cellphone user accessing a particular website would not have known that they were being added to a subscription service as the network confirmation page (a page generated by the mobile network operator) was not visible.
“Instead, the user never saw the network confirmation page (and so clearly could not click on it to subscribe to the service), but this network-hosted confirmation page is ostensibly approved by the user as the provider of this service manages to fool the network-hosted confirmation page into reporting that the user did in fact confirm a subscription to the subscription service,” Waspa said.
According to Waspa’s outside expert, during testing, a welcome message was sent out — the first time that the consumer would become aware that they had just been added to a subscription service.
The user would then receive adult-orientated content, with no prior warning to that effect, said Waspa in its report. No billing or pricing information was displayed to the end user upfront either, the expert found. There were also no terms and conditions anywhere to be found on the offending website.
Infobip Africa was given 24 hours, from 4.11pm on Monday, 11 July, to respond to the matter, but failed to do so and had still not responded after 48 hours.
Waspa said that under its rules, its members must at all times conduct themselves in a professional manner in their dealings with the public, customers, other service providers and the association itself.
They must also have honest and fair dealings with their customers and must not knowingly disseminate information that is false or deceptive, or that is likely to mislead by inaccuracy, ambiguity, exaggeration or omission, it said.
Clear pricing information must also be provided for subscription services.
The confirmation step for any subscription service must require an explicit response from the customer of that service and may not be performed in an automated manner in such a way that the process is hidden from the customer, Waspa said.
To add insult to injury, the subscription service includes adult content and no effort has been taken to protect minors from this type of service.
For all subscription services initiated via a Web page, there must be an additional specific confirmation step before the customer is billed.
In addition, any adult service must be clearly indicated as such in any promotional material and advertisement, and must contain the words “18+ only”. Waspa members must take reasonable steps to ensure that only persons of 18 years of age or older have access.
In its findings, Waspa said there is “little doubt” that this is a “cynical and criminal attempt to make money at the expense of the consumer”.
“No real attempt is made to comply with the Waspa code of conduct at all and so the breaches of the [code] are numerous and both flagrant and extreme,” the association said.
“The first time the consumer becomes aware of subscribing to the subscription service is after R5 has been billed to their account and when they receive an SMS welcoming them to the subscription service.
“Taken to its logical conclusion, this means that all that needs to happen is for a consumer to click on the Web page and click on a link (which does not identify itself as starting a subscription service or anything similar) for a subscription service to begin and for at least R5 to be deducted from that consumer’s account (and potentially more if the consumer fails to unsubscribe from the service after they have received the welcome message),” it said.
No effort to protect minors
“To add insult to injury, the subscription service includes adult content and no effort has been taken to protect minors from this type of service.”
Waspa said there is therefore a “high likelihood of considerable harm to the public if these actions are not stopped”.
Because Infobip Africa had not provided any response to Waspa, it said it could not determine whether the “services” in question were initiated and run by the company itself, or by a third-party affiliate marketer.
In the absence of information from Infobip Africa, Waspa said it has been “forced to conclude that the ‘services’ were run with the knowledge and consent of the Waspa member”.
Troublingly, the Waspa report said that it appears from the evidence that the cellphone number (MSIDSN) is able to be harvested from the consumer without their knowledge or consent simply by them browsing a particular website.
“In other words, the consumer would probably wonder how the subscription service was able to know which cellphone to bill for the subscription service as the consumer never typed their cellphone number into a text field on the website,” it said.
“This insidious collection of personal information intrudes on a consumer’s right to privacy. It would also appear that the mobile network providers allow for this information to be available to third-party websites.
“Given the fact that this information is directly related to the ability to receive money from the mobile network provider, we recommend that discussions on how to protect consumers from this type of fraud be initiated with the mobile providers with a view to protecting consumers.” — © 2016 NewsCentral Media
