We are the UK regulator for content, goods and services charged to a phone bill.

PSA fines subscription service £170,000 and bans it from market after it failed to handle customers’ complaints properly

29 January 2020

Tribunal found Unicate’s conduct “demonstrated a fundamental disregard” for phone-paid services regulation.

The Phone-paid Services Authority (PSA) has fined and banned Unicate Ltd, which ran a subscription alert service, from the market for a minimum of two years after it committed three regulatory breaches.

The Tribunal found that:

Unicate’s complaints handling procedure wasn’t good enough 
it did not properly obtain consumers’ consent to charge them
it failed to disclose information to the PSA when requested to do so. 

The Tribunal said that Unicate made an estimated £103,109 from these regulatory breaches. 

The Tribunal has also issued a General Refunds sanction, which means any affected consumer may claim a refund.

You can read the Tribunal’s decision in full here

Service providers' customer service and complaints handling are extremely important to us. If you want to find out more, including how we’re working to raise standards in the market, you can read our new blog post here.