Telstra has ended the practice of third-party subscription-based content providers charging for their products via the telco’s customer bills. Third-party billing was previously used for subscription services such as mobile games, apps and videos.
Other telcos are said to have tightened their practices over recent years due to abuse of the process, and implemented encryption to stop a customer’s phone number from being visible to a third party until a transaction is completed.
For instance Vodafone has decided to only offer third-party billing for one-off charges, like voting on a TV show.
Last year Telstra implemented a double opt-in process for premium SMS content in an effort to reduce the instances of random charges.
Now it has decided to end all subscription-based third-party billing arrangements from December 3.
