94,000 Vietnamese mobile phones are unknowingly being 'pickpocketed' by a Chinese company

The amount of money collected in 2 years is more than 230 billion VND through collecting service text message fees without customers knowing.

The Hanoi Department of Information and Communications has just announced the inspection results of the Sam Media Ltd Representative Office in Hanoi, belonging to the company of the same name.Headquartered in Hong Kong (China). This office was established to carry out business cooperation activities with 3 companies in Vietnam, providing information content services on mobile telecommunications networks via short message numbers.

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After signing the cooperation contract, Sam Media has been advertising winning prizes for phones, tablets, and phone cards on the internet using the advertising method of landing pages. The entire advertising process from customers to the company's landing page (domain name vn-mozzi.biz/vn) is carried out using the advertising network model. The purchase and sale of the above services are carried out through electronic transactions. However, the inspection agency said that this isbehaviorSet up an e-commerce website to sell products without notifying state management agencies.

On this page, the content introducing the service, information about the prize, registration code... are very large in size and font size. In contrast, the content at the bottom of the screen about the promotion program's rules, how to cancel the service, customer support phone number and service price are displayed in a much smaller font size than the above part.

According to the Department of Information and Communications, through the above customer approach, from the beginning of 2013 to March 2016, subscribers of the four telecommunications networks Viettel, MobiFone, VinaPhone and Vietnamobile had to pay a total of VND230.5 billion. The number of customers using the service as of July 19 was 93,735 subscribers.

"Many customers, when asked, did not know that they were using a service that was deducted money provided by Sam Media Company in cooperation with 3 Vietnamese companies and thought that the messages sent from the numbers to their phones every day were spam messages. They did not know that these were paid service messages," the report of the Department Inspectorate stated.

Although this company "pickpocketed" hundreds of billions of dong from customers, it onlywas fined a total of 55 million VND by the management agency based on the provisions of the Decrees issued by the Government.

According to VNE