Following a flood of complaints by the consumers regarding misleading advertisements, rules are being imposed on ringtone ads. Ring tones and wallpapers ads are going to be regulated in order to protect consumers from signing up for the high rate subscription services. Many people have run up huge bills out of their mobile phones because of misleading advertisements, which dont disclose all the costs. With the help of the new rules, the UK mobile phone operators will be able to find out how high rate subscription services are marketed by the content providers. The rules however only talk about font sizes of the ads and about how prices should be presented in TV adverts. The deadline to abide by the rules is 30th August. The first ringtone to reach the top of pop charts is the extremely popular Crazy Frog. More than 100 complaints were received regarding the Crazy Frog ringtone. When buying the Crazy Frog ring tone, the consumers are actually signing up for a subscription plan. This plan enables them to receive a new text message every week for which they are charged 3, allowing them to download another ring tone. Recently people who were misguided by the advertisements ended up paying huge bills. They unintentionally subscribed to ring tone and text services when they thought they were just buying one tune. Many people downloaded the Crazy Frog ringtone, unaware of the fact that it is only a part of a bundle of tunes and they will be billed for it on regular basis. It was said that there would be a big problem preventing ringtone sellers from giving such advertisements. Mostly, it is teenagers who do not care to understand the conditions applied to such services and are susceptible to them. The new rules will enforce the content sellers to clear the ongoing costs so that people will know what they are getting. The price specifications and how often people would be billed would be prominent in the advertisements. Small fonts and scrolling price banners would also be banned. The prices and conditions would be in the main body of an advertisement rather than the small print. As soon as someone signs up for a service, he would be getting a message giving the details of what he is getting. Customers would also be told how to unsubscribe or they would be charged 20 every month. If all the firms abide these rules, consumers would definitely be more contended. At the end of June, the Department of Trade and Industry announced a big increase in fines for firms that break rules on the selling of premium rate phone services. |
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