Hi everyone
While we do fully understand the concerns of members, the issue here is twofold:
Firstly, by downloading the app, you allow a third party to automatically control the messages send from your giffgaff account. This is clearly and expressly forbidden by our terms and conditions.
Furthermore, we do not know what else this app is doing without our members consent or knowledge so, from a security perspective, we must discourage the use of this sort of app.
The second point is around the nature of the SMS messages being sent by this app. The messages are not standard SMS, they are billed differently and at a high cost by the company operating the numbers being sent messages. Rather than pass the cost of these messages on to our members, and bill them as out-of-bundle usage as we do with premium rate SMS, we swallow the extra.
There comes a point, however, when we see excessive usage (thousands of messages per month per user in some cases) and the costs associated with them, we have to take action to protect the gaff and our members. If we didn’t, we would be forced to increase prices for everyone.
We completely understand that you may not have understood what this app does and how it works – a fact the makers of this app rely upon. Our terms and conditions are clear, however, and the volume of usage seen has somewhat forced our hand in this matter.
Dave
