This is just a warning for people to check their bills on a regular basis or check your banking statements etc, I'm sure you all do but just a reminder

Basically i noticed that last month and this month I was charged just over £12 extra than my contract price I.e my contract with Three is £18 but the bill was £30.17 for 2 months running. So I investigated deeper and found the extra charges to be "messaging", now I've not text anyone in a different country, I haven't sent a million picture messages that would equate £12.17, and I certainly haven't text any short codes for competitions etc.

So I got on the phone to Three earlier to see what was going on, after a couple of minutes I was told it was a online gaming/videos website and that I must have accidentally clicked on a link somewhere along the lines? I can't see how simply tapping a link can sign me up and start charging me over £12 without knowing!?
Anyway I did a quick google for "Zamano" and it turned up loads of results how other people have been randomly charged by this company, so watch your bills people!

Three were excellent in how they handled it by the way, the guy said he would find the number and phone them for me and keep me on the call like a conference, so basically he explained everything for me and all I had to do was say my name and give my address, they said I would be "unsubscribed" and I get a full refund in a cheque.

I'll be waiting for the cheque and I'll be checking next months bill straight away as soon as it appears on the my3 app!

Again, check your bills and statements folks, don't want anyone else to be unknowingly ripped off!

You can only subscribe to these things by clicking a link, usually on a pop up advert when browsing a Facebook article or web page. It's easily done but you definitely clicked on it.

Yeah I know I must have but its not very good if you can be "signed up" to stuff so easily! Better watch my tappy fingers next time!

Most of these need you to answer a question then physically put in your mobile number before clicking on a link, or need you to text a code word back to a short code. VERY hard to enter by accident!

Wrong, a lot of them know your mobile number in the first place and if you click in the wrong area of a pop-up ad you'll get billed immediately.

This happened to me a while back when browsing my local newspaper's website on my phone. It's a site riddled with ads that often really annoys me. One day a 'Mobile Academy' subscription service ad came up and the subscribe button was deviously located near the 'X'. Accidently hit the subscribe button and £6 taken from my credit instantly.

It did not ask me for my mobile number or ever ask me to confirm the subscription.

There are certain things I wish to do to people who set up such companies but I can't list them on here...

I got caught out by this company too ( also on the Three Network ) I have no idea how or when, but luckily they sent a cheque for the charges incurred.

I was quite surprised that Three UK were unable to simply allow me to opt out of that sort of service.

Interesting! How long did it take them to send the cheque out? I spoke to them last Sunday, haven't got anything yet so they didn't bung it in an envelope and post it first class on Monday! Still if their robbing little toe rags then I suppose they will put the cheapest stamp available on it!

Also the guy I spoke to from Three said he could put the adult filter on which would mean it's impossible to load up any dodgy ads etc, but obviously that would restrict what sites you can go on(not just the adult variety even normal sites get blocked) so I told him not to bother with that, I'll just be more careful, if that's possible.

if I remember correctly 7-10 working days for the cheque to arrive. I also asked them to ensure that I was unable to access any of their services moving forwards which they also did.

I've had it twice where I've accidentally clicked a link that popped up (once on a normal Web site and then once on a website that the Smart News app popped up with).

At no point did I ever say I wanted to subscribe to something, answer anything and even give my phone number and as soon as the popular started opening I closed it down.

There was a company called PayForIt the first time, but I forget the other company.

Three refunded me the first time and cancelled it, the 2nd time I had to speak to the company themselves and they eventually refunded me via Paypal (they said they could pay it into my bank account, but did not want to give them that info).

You should have to at least enter your mobile number and agree to something before getting charged instead of accidently clicking on a link in a popup that's just popped up a split second before you touch the screen for something else that was below it.

Well this Sunday will be 7 days, I was going to ring them tomorrow and ask where my money is, but as you've just said that I'll just wait until next week

Just got the cheque this morning, so around 6 days it took in the end, quite happy to get my money back in full but as above it really shouldnt be so easy to sign yourself up to these services.

For anyone interested or if anyone searches the forums for ''Zamano'' in the future...........

The letter is headed ''Zamano'' and it calls itself ''Premium rate sms service''.

The address on the letter is somewhere in Ireland aswell.

And i got ALL the money owed.

Think this could be handy should anyone else be robbed by this company!

Also want to add, both me and the guy i spoke to at Three said it sounds abit, and i quote ''fishy'', i mean if it was a legit company they would not just refund in full with absolutely no questions asked surely

Anyway done and dusted now, i hope!

I know its disgusting that they are able to take your money so easily and also annoys me that the network operators offer no way of blocking them with this scam and also the PayForIt robbers as well.

Glad you got the money back in the end, but it's a pain (I think next time I'll be tempted to ask for some extra for the hassle and time it causes).

I had these scammers or similar through payforit. They wanted me to give them additional information that was never given at sign up (which I dispute) and I told them that I was not giving any information other than what they already had, if that was good enough to take my money it should be good enough to refund it. Three refunded the money instead out of 'good will' I hope they stop this payment method, or at least allow customers to choose to opt out.

I can assure you I didn't put my phone number in or realise I was signing up for billable events. Three said that they could block that 1 company, but not others that use the scheme. The problem is that they share your phone number with these partners whilst you browse, as do O2 and others, hence that big O2 incident where their proxy servers were updated and the header stripping that was meant to be done for every website except the list of trusted partners stopped working, and they sent your phone number with every web request to every www.