Watch your operator bills at the end of the month! The UFC-Que Choosing alert on the fact that many customers are debited for subscriptions for which they have never subscribed, or at least not consciously …
You can never say it enough, but always remember to look at your phone bill at the end of the month, otherwise you could miss a bad surprise! Indeed, it is possible that you pay a price much higher than that of the mobile subscription to which you have subscribed! By looking at more closely, some users discover that they are debited for subscriptions to which they are however certain of not having subscribed, and even less their banking information.
These services, such as Chipstime, Echovox, Playvod, Playzer, 360 VR Tube or Top Buzz, often promise to give access to video streaming content, press items or games. To bring the user to subscribe to a subscription, they do not hesitate to use all kinds of tricks and fraudulent tips, and to go through the payment solution on internet operator invoice+, in order to go under radars. UFC-Que Choisir Sounds the alarm.
Subscription techniques are particularly vicious. It can for example be a video that appears during navigation, on which it is necessary to click to be able to view it. But it will then open another window, which encourages to click on a huge button to launch the video. Except that, below, there are in small characters the conditions displaying the price and the periodicity of the service to which, without knowing it, we are subscribing. And the trap closes …
This is what happened to a certain Eric, a customer at Orange, whose testimony is relayed by the UFC-Que Choisir. The poor man discovered, looking at the operator’s bill, whom he had been paying for four years for a ringtone service and smartphone games named replay TV France, which he does not know absolutely. “All the plans of the family are brought together in a single subscription. As the sum varies each month according to bills outside the package, I had not spotted this service”he explains. The company has ended up consenting to reimburse him for the last twelve months of subscription, but this is meager compensation. The story is repeated with Jean-Michel, Customer of Bouygues Telecom, who found that he had paid € 2.99 each week for three months for a service named Chipstime. Fortunately, he obtained a full refund at the price of long steps. But they are far from isolated cases.
To obtain the banking information of their customers – or rather of their victims – these publishers go through the payment solution on invoice internet operator+, which allows them to entrust telecom operators to charge the service to their customers and to collect Money, before picking up part of it. As your operator already has all the information, there is no need to provide any personal or bank details. But, although initially designed to facilitate the purchase of multimedia services, this system has become a real gateway for involuntary subscriptions of all kinds.
Obviously, since the deployment of the system in 2005, many guards have been implemented, such as sending confirmation SMS or the establishment of an ethics charter and a monthly expense ceiling, but This remains insufficient in the face of abuses. According to the UFC-Que Choisir, operators and publishers, attracted by a rapidly growing market, are slow to adopt more strict solutions to protect their customers.
Indeed, fraudulent subscriptions are often made through accidental clicks, a friction of the phone in a pocket, or a child playing on the device. In short, an unfortunate gesture that validates one of the steps in the purchasing process. Not to mention that confirmation SMS sent to alert users are frequently ignored or confused with fraudulent messages. But, despite the requests of consumer associations to establish protections, such as identity verification or default blockage of the Internet+service, operators are slow to make things happen.
And this is quite normal, because they have no financial interest, on the contrary, since they recover part of the recipes thus generated. “No question for them to restrict a growing market which, in 2023, weighed more than 650 million euros”note the association. However, it would be enough to deactivate the Internet+ by default option, in order to ensure that users are forced to go to the options of their customer area to activate it manually when they really need it. But no, this is a real financial windfall which operators especially do not want to deprive themselves!
In the meantime, consumers must be vigilant. They absolutely must check their invoices regularly and quickly dispute any suspicious subscription via platforms like Singafature.fr. Just type the name of the service editor to obtain his contact details and thus cancel the subscription or contest the purchase directly from him. Note that all operators offer an option to block these subscriptions. Just activate it on your online space. Keep your eye open!