In-app payments and NFC could make it worse, warns BillingScore.
On the same day that UK regulator PhonePayPlus claimed UK premium rate complaints were encouragingly down, Billingscore sounded a note of grave caution.
The UK firm says fraud affects all the players in the mobile industry – from SMS wholesalers and aggregators, through to content providers, retailers, operators and of course consumers.
It even argues that operators' 30 per cent rev shares are high to cover fraud and bad debt, and that this reduces the industry’s opportunity to further own the consumer’s wallet.
Billingscore has been very vocal about the explosion in fraud. It wrote about 'artificially inflated traffic' and other new scams recently on this site.
It has also highlighted potential scams resulting from in-app payments, which criminals will target as the space is predicted to grow by 600 per cent this year.
Article continues belowAdvertisement
It says recent moves from the UK operators appear to be pushing the responsibility for fraud and bad debt onto the service providers.
One tactic is to increase the ‘claw back’ if service providers allow customers to exceed daily spending limits on premium rate services.
This raises questions over whether services such as NFC-payments can ever truly replace the wallet if daily spend is to be capped by operators.
Teresa Cottam, research director of the firm behind the report, Telesperience, said: “Everyone in the mobile industry knows that fraud, bad debt and other types of revenue loss are a major issue – yet hardly anyone talks about it.
“The scale of the problem is hidden and the cost built into existing business models. The mobile sector simply cannot afford to continue haemorrhaging money in this way; nor can it keep hitting honest customers in the pocket in the form of higher charges, simply because it has failed to address the losses.”
Add a new comment
You need to be logged in to post comments. If you do not have an account then please register.
Comments
0 comments
There are no comments yet, be the first to add one!