Unauthorised Charges by Boku on My Daughter’s Phone Bill – Advice Needed

[Nkosi]

Hi everyone,I’m posting here to raise awareness and seek advice about an issue I’ve encountered with unauthorised charges on my daughter’s mobile phone bill.

I recently noticed extra charges on her phone account, which is under my name and managed by me. Her monthly bill is capped, so it shouldn’t exceed the contracted amount. After contacting the provider (Three), I discovered that these charges were for Boku.com, a third-party payment service that works with my provider.

The charges were for PlayStation Network services, but neither I nor my 12-year-old daughter own a PlayStation or have a PlayStation Network account. Importantly, my daughter is a minor and cannot legally enter into such agreements. Even if she attempted to subscribe to anything, it would require my authorisation, which never happened.

What’s worse is that we had never heard of Boku before this, never signed up for their services, and were never notified of any agreements or charges.

This situation raises several concerns for me:

1. How was Boku able to authorise charges without explicit consent from me as the account holder?

2. Why wasn’t I notified about these transactions before they were billed?

From my research, it seems this could violate UK consumer protection laws, including:

• The Consumer Rights Act 2015, which ensures protection from unauthorised charges.

• The Payment Services Regulations 2017, which require clear consent for payments.

• The UK GDPR, which protects personal data from being used without explicit permission.

I’ve already contacted Boku to demand an immediate refund and assurance that my daughter’s phone number will not be used for their services again. However, I wanted to share my experience here in case others have faced similar issues and to ask:

1. Has anyone else experienced unauthorised charges from Boku or similar third-party services?

2. What steps did you take to resolve the issue?

3. Do you think I should escalate this to the Financial Ombudsman or the ICO if I don’t get a satisfactory response?

I’ll keep this post updated with any progress, but for now, I want to warn others to check their phone bills carefully—especially for numbers used by children.Thanks in advance for any advice or similar stories you can share!

[JonathanB]

Hi @chopsy1974,

I've posted a couple of links elsewhere on this topic, hopefully these should help:

You can find the Boku customer portal here: https://customer.boku.com/login

This should allow you to view details of transactions, cancel any subscriptions, and block your number from future transactions through Boku there too.

You can also find more support from Boku here: https://boku.com/help

Thanks,
Jonathan

[TJ990]

Except, unlike a bank, Three have implemented a system with no security controls, fraud detection or spend limits and have essentially put an uncontrolled credit card into the hands of peoples children and left them open to now be targeted by scammers with nothing more than a phone number

[DonnaB180680]

Totally agree 

[Mickgrant]

I have just noticed this out of the blue on two of my daughter’s bills. This month and last month. £170. I’m heading to Three to get a block put on, I will also contact Bolu.

thanks for posting about this.

[TJ990]

This just happened to me as well, £133 of charges to my 14 year old daughters number, I have not given any kind of explicit consent for three to set up a payment service against my accounts, especially not the phone numbers used by my children and have a spend cap on every account of either 0 or £10, this cap apparently does not apply to thrid party charges, nor does it seem easy to find what the charges are for, when I logged on to my account and viewed the bill it only showed as 3rd party charges and not itemised.

Three are less than helpful and only want to deflect any reponsibility from themselves and direct you to talk to boku.com, it took nearly half an hour of reinforcing that Three also have responsibility for allowing such transactions and preventing future transactions to get them to raise a case to investigate them with Boku themselves.

The biggest issue for me however is that they have absolutely no control over this three pay service, they advised that they are not able to disable three pay on any of my accounts, even those used by children, and they are not able to add any sort of spend cap or block any future transactions, this seems like extremely irresponsible financial conduct to me, they are effectively allowing a mobile phone number to be used as a debit card without any checks or limits on transactions or who has access to use them, 3 individual transactions were made via Boku/PSN within 1 minute on an account that has never previously used three pay and yet somehow this was not picked up as fraudulent or unusual.

They also don't have any other methods in place to ensure the account holder is aware of what is happening, everything is based on the phone number only, no other form of authentication or notification, there are no email confirmations of transactions being made to the acount holder email or anything, given that a large amount of phone numbers on their network will be used by people under the age of consenting to such services, there should be more authentication required before this is enabled or any transactions allowed, it is absolutely absurd that the only thing needed to set up a payment is the phone number and a code sent to that same number, with every other payment service only the account holder has the relevant information to set up such a payment as well as the approved two factor authentication method such as app approval or which number to text a security code to, with this service you don't need anything more than knowing the phone number, as the account holder has not been involved in agreeing to or setting any security for the service.

Despite numerous times of stating that the transactions were not made by ourselves and asking them to block any transaction Three repeatedly kept saying that the only way to prevent transactions is to make sure we are not selecting three pay online or to go into settings and ensure it is not included as a payment method or a subscription, they just would not acknowledge that these were fraudulent transactions and not a mistake on our part or that they have a responsibility to have a method to be able to stop or reject such transactions, they even tried to falsely claim that using apple pay in a shop might have caused it after repeating that my daughter's phone is locked down for all payments except apple pay, which in itself is only linked to a spending limited go henry card, any other mobile phone transactions such as apps can only be made via approval from my account linked to my own apple payment method and not via three in any way shape or form.

So far I have raised cases with Three to investigate, as well as a complaint case with three on their irresponsible implementation and managment of three pay, I have also submitted an email to fraud@boku.com and received a ref for that.

I spoke to playstation but they couldn't do anything if it wasn't a transaction made against my account but did log the issue under a reference number so they can log the issue for information.

I've also raised.a case with Action fraud they logged a case for information gathering on these issues but it's not considered a police matter unless a refund of the transactions is not forthcoming.

I've also submitted a case via the Financial Conduct Authority under the Payment Service option as that is essentially what is being provided here and I simply don't believe that it should be possible for a company to blanketly enable a payment service with no explicit consent or active opt in by the consumer and without any investigation as to which numbers may be being used by a minor, more so for the provider Three to seemingly have absolutely no ability to control or limit its use or any other fraud detection processes or other checks to ensure it is being financially responsible with regards to the potential for causing people unnecessary debt due to the lack of account holder consent or involvement when enabling this service

[TJ990]

I've also submitted a billing monitoring information form to ofcom as they have apparently taken over from the former Payment Systems Regulators which I found use to be the regulator when it comes to Phone Pay services like these, it's only information to monitor billing issues from companies like three, but may be useful if more people submit a form on the same issues as the biggest problem is the way it has been implemented without any way for the account holder to manage it or prevent these payments, so from my view the individual transactions on my account is one thing, but unless the system is overhauled then they're simply providing a much easier path for scammers and thieves to achieve their goals by targeting our children through either theft or social engineering, as in normal circumstances with other payment services children wouldn't have the access to provide any useful financial information.

It seems that only if Three does not resolve or respond the complaint can you then take it to the Alternative Dispute Resolution Scheme to independently investigate, if they respond but do not uphold then a deadock letter is required in order to make that dispute

[fefe]

It happened the same to me and my daughter phone she only wrote her number to a friend in a TikTok message

[Iclads]

Update - Boku refunded me the full amount taken. They refunded via PayPal which I felt was the safest way to proceed with the refund - fyi, I cancelled my phone contract as a result of this, if I hadn’t, they could have refunded back to the three account. However, I read on another site it took months for three to then reimburse….. PayPal seems the way forward.

[nishasany]

Hi , it happened to me . Would you be able to tell me how you get contacted with Boku and how did you manage to request the refund please. Please explain that would be helpful 🙏

[JonathanB]

Hi @nishasany,

You can find the Boku customer portal here: https://customer.boku.com/login

This should allow you to view details of transactions, cancel any subscriptions, and block your number from future transactions through Boku there too.

You can also find more support from Boku here: https://boku.com/help

Thanks,
Jonathan