All you have to do is click on an advertisement and additional services are automatically activated in the rate. Services that you will activate and that will be reflected in your bill month by month until you realize it and claim the operator. You activate them directly when you search for games on the Internet or play games in your phone’s browser. When you play or accept on a web page you have accessed, this service is activated and you will start to be charged month by month on your bill for something you are not using. There is no type of confirmation or data or password or code that you have to enter to sign up for the service but simply by clicking, involuntarily, we activated it and started paying for them week after week…
In addition, there is no type of notice in the subscription and it is renewed every week. Every week there is a renewal of these services that you accidentally activate and you will not receive an SMS or any other type of confirmation. If you have kids or children at home or have just tapped into an ad, you may be paying for this and not even know it.
There are many cases of Premium SMS that are activated involuntarily and, as stated in the Spanish Association of Companies Against Fraud (AEECF) is a content subscription service such as games, contests, ringtones or music requested by sending SMS that have a special rate. They are activated, we do not realize it and we pay for it monthly. Through unofficial content or application download page and through many other methods. They explain from the Internet Security Office (OSI): “There are many other methods to deceive us and have us share our phone number or reply to messages; for example, through online games, tarot queries or viewing adult content where they ask us for the phone number to give us access or for a supposed evaluation of our age of majority “
In any case, we must be alert and not enter our number in contests or draws, or reply to unknown SMS and keep an eye on your bill to avoid these charges.
How can we avoid it?
The best way to see if we are being scammed and paying for services we are not using is look for the itemized invoice of our operator and see if there is any service that does not fit us or that we have not contracted. We must look not only at the total amount we are paying but also at the details of what you are paying and exclusively for services that you have contracted…
For example, note that they charge you for the fixed line and the mobile line and the telephone or the television package but not that there are activated services such as online games or exclusive content, raffles, music, downloading ringtones…