Miriam seeks fine for ‘unsought’ prepaid services

Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago has filed a bill that could finally address complaints of many mobile phone users about credit guzzlers in the form of unsought services such as ring tones and multimedia messages.

Acting on complaints from numerous mobile phone subscribers both prepaid and postpaid, Santiago filed Senate Bill No. 2088 or the "Unsought Cellular Mobile Phone Services Act of 2005," which seeks to impose stiff sanctions against telecommunications firms that automatically and involuntarily charge their subscribers for unsought services.

Under the legislation, the guilty telecommunications firms could be penalized with a fine of as much as P1 million or the suspension or revocation of their permits to operate, or both.

The bill exempts services used by the telecoms firms for promotion, advertisement and campaign purposes free of charge.

"Numerous complaints have reached my office regarding the propensity of telecom companies to barrage their subscribers with unwanted services such as ringing tones, polyphonic tones and video and picture messages and then automatically charge these to their subscribers," Santiago said.

She said that the right of subscribers to decide on how they may want to use their credits should be affirmed considering that a significant percentage of the mobile phone users are prepaid subscribers and belong to the middle and low-income classes.

For some time already, a great deal of mobile phone users have been complaining about the regular reception of ring tones, logos or picture messages from their provider which cost them at least P2.50 each without their consent.

The telecom firms have defended this practice by claiming that the delivery of the services were activated by the subscribers themselves upon receiving promotional messages for the services.

They also argued that the services could be deactivated by sending a specific text message to a number designated by the company.

However, most subscribers do not know how to deactivate the service feature. — Marvin Sy