South African cellular subscription services are becoming more and more of a headache for mobile phone users, says Davin Mole, CEO of the Exact Mobile Group.

Adverts promoting subscriptions services are misleading, and, once subscribed, Mole says it can sometimes be extremely difficult for the user to find out which service they are subscribed to, or how to unsubscribe.

Mole says Exact Mobile?s help desk regularly gets complaints from users who have been subscribed to a subscription services and contact the Exact Mobile call center to try and get help.

?Users get caught by the subscription services because users are only notified in the fine print at the bottom of the advert that they are in fact joining a subscription service. However, most users do not read the fine print and therefore think they are purchasing content on a case by case basis. When they see someone sending them content on a regular basis and billing them for it, they often send a complaint to our help desk, but Exact Mobile does not have any subscription services,? he says.

To try and combat the problem, Mole says Exact Mobile filed a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) against cellular subscription services in general.

?However, the ASA said we were unable to lay a general complaint and had to pick a specific advert. We therefore filed a complaint against an advert by a subscription service called Jippii, run by iTouch,? he says.

The ASA on Friday ruled that the Jippii advert had to be withdrawn with immediate effect, on the ground that it is misleading, and is not be used again in its current format.

The ASA said in its ruling that while the advert does say in the fine print that by sending an SMS to the premium SMS number the user is joining a subscription service, the advert gives the impression that content is downloaded one item at a time and was therefore misleading.

?There are ex facie two general types of download services available: those where the consumer downloads and pays for one item at a time, and those where the user pays a subscription. This material difference must be clearly and unambiguously conveyed in all sections of the relevant advertising material,? the statement says.

Mole says that he will now be sending the ruling to the cellular networks and the Wireless Application Service Provider Association (WASPA) and asking them to address the issue of cellular subscription services.

?While adverts like the Jippii advert are already illegal, according to the WASPA code of conduct, WASPA is only accepting complaints from Sept. 1, 2005, which means advertising is unlikely to change before then. WASPA has said that from July 31, 2005 any user who initiates to a subscription service must be sent an SMS notifying them that it is a subscription service,? Mole says.

?However, neither of these take into account the fact that users who have already unknowingly subscribed to subscription services will still be paying for it. We are therefore asking the cellular networks and WASPA to ban this type of advertising, have all such adverts withdrawn across all media forms immediately and force subscription services to unsubscribe all users. The companies could then notify users that their service is a subscription service, and ask them whether they want to subscribe to it,? he adds.

Furthermore, Mole says Exact Mobile wants WASPA to force all subscription services to send a monthly reminder to all their users, reminding them that they are subscribed and telling them how they can unsubscribe.

?That way if a user does not realize they have subscribed to a service, they have the option to get out of it,? he concludes.