Telstra Premium SMS Outage causes grief
We received an Email from a source working in the Premium industry we thought we’d copy/paste to give you uncut. It appears that Telstra, ACMA and the TIO are really good friends as Telstra gets away with everything…
“In the period 13 July to 18 July 2010 the Telstra network COMPLETELY went down for Premium [...]
Vision 6 Responds
In response to our previous post on Vision6, their marketing manager has written in to explain their side of the story:
My name is Lisa Renneisen and I am the marketing manager for Vision 6. I just wanted to clarify the situation with regards to your post about the Vision 6 Woolworths premium SMS scam;
Vision 6 [...]
ACMA issues formal spam warning
From Australia.to News:
The Australian Communications and Media Authority has issued a formal warning to Hyarchis Company Limited for alleged breaches of the Spam Act 2003. The alleged breaches were in relation to the sending of commercial electronic messages by SMS, without the consent of the recipient.
Commercial electronic messages can be sent by email, SMS, MMS and [...]
How Telstra makes us look like idiots on the world stage
Here’s a great article in The Age from last year showing a different perspective. In many Western countries, broadband is fast, cheap and unmetered. That means that there’s no shaping once you’ve hit your quota, or in Telstra’s case, ridiculously excessive overuse fees.
Telstra has held back this country’s communications infrastructure for years.
This article explains how.
Telstra’s Premium Rate Policy
We know we expose ourselves to a lot of pressure, harassment and danger to “fight the 1000 pounds Gorilla” - but sorry, bringing out the truth is our nature!
Now you won’t believe this:
Secrets about Telstra’s Premium SMS Policy
As you are aware, Telstra cashes in heaps for delivering premium SMS. Now that’s the way it works: [...]
Wixawin in the News
In an earlier post outlining our issues with the Wixawin campaign, our position was that they used misleading tactics (i.e. the Woolworth’s campaign) that presented their campaigns as authorised by the companies featured in their marketing.
Today Tonight had a piece on Wixawin last night, that highlighted this misleading marketing in addition to their poor customer [...]
XploraTones Update
For the sake of completeness, we asked XploraTones to provide us with a ‘winner’s list’ for the last 6 months.
They agreed.
To comply with the privacy act, we signed a non-disclosure agreement and then contacted a random sample of the people on the list. Each person we contacted verified that they had indeed participated in XploraTones [...]
XploraTones
We’ve had a few reports come in over the last couple of weeks of a company called XploraTones (or sometimes just ‘Xplora’) that captures customers by a variety of methods - either websites or print promotions.
In the course of our investigations we’ve been in contact with these guys and while their practice might be unsavoury [...]
More on Wixawin
Wixawin are just all over the place at the moment!
One of their more hardcore campaigns revolves around ‘winning’ a $500 gift voucher to spend at Woolworths.
As usual, the landing pages are non-compliant with carrier guidelines. Even worse, they don’t state what you have to do to claim the $500 voucher.
Now we have no objection to [...]
Wixawin in the UK
Looks like the Brits also have trouble with Wixawin.
We knew they were international, but had only tracked Spain and Canada so far.
The forum thread in the link above has multiple people complaining about Wixawin’s deceptive business practices.
