aimm News

11 August 2014

AIME, together with the Mobile Broadband Group (www.mobilebroadbandgroup.com) and PhonepayPlus (www.phonepayplus.org) has written to Ms. Andrea Leadsom MP, Financial Secretary to the Treasury to seek support of the UK Treasury in blocking proposed changes to the European Payment Services Directive (PSD) that will affect the operation of most of the premium rate industry and move mobile and fixed line services into Financial Regulation.

As the proposed changes were not justified by any loopholes or exploits created through the 2007 Payment Services Directive and the new wording for exempting telecommunication providers would force them to make significant architectural and operational changes  to support financial type payments (or kill nearly a third of their premium rate business), AIME has been lobbying since September 2013 to suppress the change.

Proposals for revisions to the exemption wording by the EU Council have been seen by AIME and while improved will limit the per transaction and per month consumer expenditure in contradiction to regulatory changes that increase consumer spend limits on telecoms accounts.

AIME, MBG and PPP worked with the UK Treasury to input the UK concerns to EU, but AIME feels that these concerns are not getting the  priority treatment that is required to ensure UK interests (which are reflected at least by Ireland France and Czech Republic) are robustly protected.

As a result, the letter to Andrea Leadsom is designed to improve awareness of our concerns to a higher level and at time of writing, a response has been received from the Treasury

AIME Members can access the letter here

 

08 August 2014

AIME, the Association of Interactive and Media Entertainment professionals specialising in micropayment services including voting, competitions, charity donations and mobile commerce, today released its Early Warning System to Members to warn Digital Marketing companies about rogue and fraudulent practices operated by entities masquerading as legitimate online publishers.

These practices are designed to defraud digital advertisers of their advertising funds and in the process, often cause issues for consumers who may be misled into purchasing services that they do not want.

AIME Members in the micropayment (also called premium rate) market raised their concerns around malpractice affecting digital marketing, and AIME responded with two major initiatives. The first is the AIME Digital Marketing Guide that advises advertisers operating in the internet marketing arena, on how to detect and prevent fraud attempts aimed at their advertising budget.

The second is a community blogging platform known as the AIME Early Warning System for advertisers to warn each other of bad practices that they have encountered when conducting their own monitoring.

Additional to advertisers’ posting warnings, AIME has negotiated to receive postings from PhonepayPlus (the UK premium rate regulator) and from monitoring and compliance companies such as Enarpee, Empello and ETX.  AIME is in discussions with anti-virus software companies and the UK Cabinet Office about collaborating with their cybercrime and malware information sharing initiatives, and getting their relevant alerts posted into the AIME Early Warning System.

Cybercrime can affect consumers who use smartphones, tablets and computers to access the internet.  Consumers are particularly vulnerable if they have not installed anti-virus software on portable devices as infections with adware or malware are becoming increasingly common.

In addition the Internet is rife with dubious practices like ‘clickjacking’ and ‘typosquatting’, designed to trick consumers into visiting or even purchasing chargeable services under false pretences.

In all these cases, it is often the internet advertiser who has to deal with the fallout from the consumer issue while also losing out financially to the fraud.

Used together, AIME’s Digital Marketing Guide and Early Warning System provides relevant and timely information to enable advertiser to protect themselves from affiliate fraud and in doing so, help to protect online consumers from harm.

AIME Chairman Edward Boddington, stated:

“Affiliate marketing fraud is a serious problem for all Internet advertisers.  It causes particular issues for merchants using micropayment options as often the fraud is not caught until after users have been misled, leading to brand damage in addition to defrauded advertising spend.

Last year Internet advertising fraud cost AIME members around £20 million, in addition to considerable brand damage.

“Together AIME’s two initiatives are equivalent to a Neighbourhood Watch for online advertisers.  Both initiatives are a success because of the extensive support provided by Members.  AIME’s strength is enabling Members to collaborate on solutions to industry issues so as to protect and nurture the marketplace in which they work.”

We are aware that users are experiencing some problems with the downloadable contribution form on our new EWS site. The form is currently in PDF format and people are having difficulties editing the fields as needed.

 

If you would like to make a contribution we now have a Word version of this form available. Please email: info@aimm.co for this and we will send it over to you ASAP.

 

We are in the process of trying rectifying this problem on our site as soon as we can, so everyone has easy access to the Word version of this form.

 

Many thanks for your patience on this matter.

 

The AIME Team