James Q. Pearce at MocoNews points us to a report by The Age which claims that Australian youngsters are having to declare themselves bankrupt due to overspending their meagre revenue on mobile bills.

“Fair Trading Minister Linda Burney said a survey conducted by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) had highlighted concerns about “premium” mobile phone content and the massive bills being racked up - often unknowingly - by users.

“Suddenly they have got bills of $3,000 to $4,000 AUD because they thought services they were getting in term of downloads and ringtones, and voting on Big Brother, were free,” Ms Burney told reporters.”

Normally, my attitude would be that someone should give them a dollar to go buy a clue and that these teens should get themselves out of the trouble they got in. Learning responsibility, character building and what not.

But when it comes to mobile, there are some very grey zones. In theory, providers of mobile services are obliged to clearly explain cost of use in plain English. In practice, they’ll often use convoluted terminology and small print to pass a quick one while the user isn’t paying attention. With no experience in escalating issues with customer service in a telco, the teens find themselves backed against a wall and declaring bankruptcy crops up as a potential way out.

In my ideal world of rainbows and unicorns, every service would be morally correct and would not attempt to fool consumers. There would be no headline shouting “Only £1 for the ringtone” shadowing over small print whispering that a minimum of half a dozen ringtones a month must be purchased.

As James suggests, “surely a little flag saying ‘hey, this person has spent $200 on mobile content, we should let them know’ isn’t that hard to implement?” This should be a requirement where any service provider is required to update customers regularly on their spending.

For example, T-Mobile UK sent me a free SMS every Friday at lunchtime to let me know how many of my monthly minutes I had left and how long I had to use them up. After a few weeks, I stopped the automated SMS since I had a pretty good idea of my phone use, but it was extremely useful in the early days. Networks are also taking a step in the right direction by notifying you of roaming charges via SMS when entering a new European country.

To the suggestion of widening the net to all paid-for mobile services, the default reaction for operators would most likely be that it’ll cause users to hold back on using their services - having realised how much money they’re blowing on Crazy Frog ringtones - promptly eating into their high profit margins.

That being said, I’m convinced that for nine out of 10 users, it would have quite the opposite effect. The most common reservation we continually hear during user testing sessions for Taptu is that most consumers have no concept of how much a song download or a quick browse of the mobile web is costing them. As a result, they choose to avoid using it altogether for fear of racking up immense bills. For these users, I’m willing to bet my place in the iPhone queue this Friday that they’d be pleasantly surprised at the low cost of their mobile web use.

Do other services offer this kind of triggered courtesy notices to let you track your spending? Would you welcome such a service?

If these automated messages were sent to the teens The Age reported on, they couldn’t claim innocence when the bills start rolling in, forcing them to decide to either pay up, shape up their habits in the future or disconnect and find a different hobby. Maybe knitting or paperclip collecting.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Community and social networks, Network Operators, On the Radar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.