Ouch! How I was hit by a ‘first aid’ text message trickster

DISCOVERING you have been the victim of a premium text scam can plunge you into an Alice in Wonderland world where nothing quite adds up – least of all your mobile phone bill.

For three successive weeks I received a text each Friday in the early hours simply stating ‘PayForIt Charge’. I assumed there would be a charge if I replied so ignored it.

I was wrong. Each text from 300 900 09 cost £4.50. I was annoyed and began to wonder who was taking my money.

When I called my network provider Tesco Mobile, I was told a ‘payment platform’ called Tap2Bill had debited my account, but precious little else.

The regulator, the Phone-paid Services Authority (PSA), referred me to its search database where all premium content providers have to lodge their details.

Alarmingly this gave me the wrong company but in the meantime I discovered that Tap2Bill was the brainchild of IMImobile, a large telecommunications company.

Tap2Bill allows you to buy goods or services on your mobile at the click of a button without using card details and is approved by all major mobile networks.

When I contacted IMImobile it said the provider that had charged me was actually J1Media for a service called ‘Learn First Aid’. Records, it said, showed I had given my consent.

I’ve never heard of J1Media, never received a service called ‘Learn First Aid’ and never knowingly provided my consent.

When I tried to contact J1Media using the PSA’s registered helpline contact details I could never get through.

Company records show that J1Media is owned by 28-year-old David Flood. A cursory online check shows that J1Media has a reputation as a scam merchant, allegedly relying on people clicking on internet pop-ups to generate its income. When I

emailed Flood, he said he would stop the charges and offered me £27 compensation, but declined to answer what services they gave me for my money – or how I had given consent.

Nor would he comment on the claim that his company is a scam. So far I have been unable to claim the compensation offered. A curious aspect to all this is that the PSA made it clear no blame attaches to IMImobile, even though the company admits it took a cut of my money.

The PSA refused to reveal how many complaints it had received about Tap2Bill, but a Freedom of Information request revealed there had been 13,000 complaints about services operating via Tap2Bill since the beginning of 2016.

For 2017 and 2018, J1Media was the subject of 230 complaints.

IMImobile admits it has a commercial relationship with these premium providers but declined to reveal what cut they got of my £4.50. It said Tap2Bill ‘contributed less than 1.5 per cent of the consolidated revenues’ of the group which last year totalled £111 million.

It also confirmed that it conducted due diligence on all merchants it worked with and took ‘immediate action’ if either the PSA code or mobile operator codes of practice were broken – or where consumer harm was discovered. This month the PSA took firm action against two companies for charging customers without their consent.

Xplosion Ltd, which we reported on last October after it was fined more than £1million, has been banned from the market for eight years.

Global Awareness, which charged up to £4.50 a week for a ‘glamour’ video subscription service, has been banned for five years.

Last week, in response to my issue, the PSA insisted it is ‘a regulator, not an ombudsman or consumer advice service’. It added: ‘It is not our role to champion individual consumer cases.’

For all my staring through the looking glass, I am none the wiser about what I was getting for my payment and how I gave consent.