Steven Ciobo (Moncrieff, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business, Independent Contractors, Tourism and the Arts) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise this morning to talk about a scam that has been operating and entrapping a large number of my constituents. Constituents have contacted me on numerous occasions to raise their concerns about what they refer to as a telecommunications scam. Essentially, the way the system operates is that members receive SMS messages on their mobile telephones. These SMS messages are actually charged to their accounts in the order of some $2.50 per SMS and up to some $6 or $7 per SMS. My constituents suddenly find that after a period of as little as a month, for example, they can receive up to hundreds of dollars of charges on their mobile telephone accounts—charges that they have not authorised, that they are unaware of and that of course put a great financial burden on them when they have to pay them.

Constituents who have contacted me, such as Mr Ian Roberts and Mr Kevin Glasheen, are very concerned that there may be a very large number of other people in my electorate, and indeed across Australia, who are caught up in this telecommunications scam. They have been pressuring me to use whatever influence I can with the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy to ensure that these SMS subscription schemes are made illegal unless there is express written consent from those who are allegedly subscribing to these services.

What is particularly concerning is that a lot of these organisations from which people receive one SMS message automatically enrol those people on the SMS scheme without their consent. A company by the name of Zengo uses the ‘5th Finger’ company—www.5thfinger.com.au—as the gateway to solicit people into competitions, according to one of my constituents, and then charges subscribers $2.50 for every message that is sent to the subscriber. Unfortunately, there is no way of contacting this company so it requires a great deal of time and effort on the part of my constituents who are attempting to unsubscribe from the service, which they never requested to be subscribed to in the first place.

This is clearly a scam. This is clearly costing my constituents—and indeed, no doubt, many Australians—potentially hundreds of dollars on their monthly phone bills. More concerning and distressing is the fact that my constituents have to go to so much effort to try to unsubscribe from a service that they never wanted to be part of in the first place. I encourage the government to do whatever it can, as swiftly as it can, to ensure that these kinds of so-called subscription services are deemed to be illegal unless there is express, written consent from a subscriber that indicates they would like to be part of this potentially very expensive exercise. I encourage the minister for communications to investigate this matter very promptly, to ensure that people are no longer caught up in such schemes—and, more importantly, I urge the companies that sit behind this scam to make sure that they respond in a willing and appropriate way.