Telus let third parties bill customers for horoscope texts — $7.34M in rebates

Third-party premium text services — trivia, daily horoscopes, ringtones — billed Telus and Koodo wireless customers after ads appeared in pop-ups, apps and social media. The Bureau concluded that Telus made, or permitted to be made, false or misleading representations in those ads: the charges landed on phone bills without a disclosure adequate to what the customer was agreeing to. The carrier was the billing rails; the ads rode on them, and the carrier was responsible for what they said.

The consent agreement of 30 December 2015 required rebates of up to $7.34 million to current and former Telus and Koodo customers who were charged for the services from 1 January 2011 onward. Telus was the second of Canada's major carriers to settle the premium-text sweep — Rogers had agreed to $5.42 million in refunds earlier that year.

The principle is the one the Bureau applied across the sweep: a carrier that permits misleading advertising on its own billing relationship is answerable for it, even when a third party wrote the ad and took the money. Owning the bill means owning the claims made against it.