It was fairly common a few years ago for citizens to get billed for services without consent: I remember waking up one morning to see a notification of having been charged Rs 99 for apparently downloading an animation at 3am, while asleep. On another occasion, an extra connection, which wasn't checked very often, was been charged Rs 30 per month for job alerts. While India had become the poster-child for the success of "Ringback Tones", the inside story was that most of those users didn't know why they had been subscribed to it, and why money was also being deducted from it. The reason for this problem: the money was being deducted, on most occasions, from peoples prepaid balance, a wallet which already had money deposited it it after the user recharged her phone. From what we hear, subscription was either without consent, or on the basis of manufactured consent (logs being changed; they're editable). The situation reached bizarre levels where consumers were being charged even when they had no balance left: it was called negative billing. The scam, so-to-speak, was run in two ways: firstly, via an out-bound-dialer, where people would receive phone calls, and would get subscribed to services. Secondly, via online advertising, where services would be activated merely upon clicking on an advertisement, where click to buy ads were being run. It doesn't matter where the blame lies: with the telecom operators, the mobile VAS companies, or both. The fact remains that both benefited from this, and consumers were…
