Mobile phone Crazy Johns who quit the Telstra network before the roll out of Next G Network and Optus have been pulled up by the the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) for misleading advertising claims.

According ADNews the ACCC has accepted court enforceable undertakings from Crazy John’s where it will compensate customers who feel they were misled by the company’s “free” or “$0” handset advertising campaign.

Legal action was started against Crazy John’s by the ACCC in January. The mobile phone provider had promoted its handsets as “free” or “$0” when consumers were effectively paying for the handsets through higher call rates than those available on comparable plans which did not include a handset.

Crazy John’s has agreed to compensate consumers, cease advertising “free” or “$0” in a misleading manner, implement a trade practices law compliance program and pay the ACCC’s legal costs.

Optus has also agreed to clarify a representation regarding its Optus Fusion bundled home phone and broadband cap TV advertising campaign, following intervention by the ACCC.

Between 15 July and 30 September 2007, Optus, via a national wide television advertising campaign, claimed Fusion customers could have access to “unlimited” local, national and calls to Optus mobiles from their home phone service, when in fact the offer only included “standard” local calls and did not include “unlimited” calls to mobiles on the CDMA and MobileSat networks.

Following complaints by the ACCC, Optus has agreed to notify existing customers that they may have been misled and credit those customers, where necessary, for the cost of those calls.

See ADNews
http://www.adnews.com.au/news.cfm?NewsID=4473&alpha=17000&beta=46539