Ad description
A leaflet and a website for Lebara Mobile, a telecommunications company, seen on 30 October 2017:
a. The leaflet featured the text “Unlimited international calls - £10”.
b. The website, https://mobile.lebara.com/gb/en, featured a page titled “Unlimited International £10”. Text underneath the sub-heading “Terms & Conditions” stated “Where a plan has unlimited minutes, these are subject to fair usage policy”.
Issue
Six complainants challenged whether the claim “unlimited” in both ads was misleading.
Response
Lebara said they applied a cap on their service to regulate fraud attempts resulting from illegitimate use of the unlimited calls. They explained when a customer reached the cap, they were suspended from the service and charged the applicable standard rates. They said they applied the cap instead of monitoring customers as a potential fraudulent threat.
Lebara said they intended to remove the cap from their services and update the terms and conditions on their website.
Assessment
Upheld
The ASA noted that both ads featured the claim “Unlimited” and that ad (b) also included the text “Where a plan has unlimited minutes, these are subject to fair usage policy”. We considered consumers were likely to expect that the features of the service described as “unlimited” were not unduly limited and that where a Fair Usage Policy (FUP) existed, the restrictions could reasonably be considered to be moderate.
We understood that Lebara applied a cap on usage in order to regulate illegitimate use of the unlimited calls and that customers who reached the cap were suspended from service and charged the standard rates for calls. We considered merely exceeding a particular level of usage was not enough to render a user illegitimate. Furthermore, we considered consumers would not expect an “unlimited” call service to suspend users from service once they reached a usage cap.
We noted ad (b) included text that stated the service was subject to an FUP. However, Lebara had not provided any evidence to demonstrate that the FUP was moderate and not contrary to consumers’ expectations of an “unlimited” calls service. While we welcomed Lebara’s willingness to remove the cap, because at the time of the complaints Lebara had applied restrictions to the “unlimited” service and were unable to demonstrate that they were moderate, we concluded that both ads were misleading.
Both ads breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 3.1 3.1 Marketing communications must not materially mislead or be likely to do so. and 3.3 (Misleading advertising), 3.7 (Substantiation) and 3.9 3.9 Marketing communications must state significant limitations and qualifications. Qualifications may clarify but must not contradict the claims that they qualify. (Qualification).
Action
The ads must not appear again in their current form. We told Lebara not to describe their service as “unlimited” if additional charges applied, or if they imposed restrictions that were not moderate in association with a Fair Usage Policy.
