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Collapse of MOBILEPHONESTHEWEB.COM, DIALAMOBILE LTD , ASTON SCIENCE PARK, UNIT 4 BIRMINGHAM

About 30,000 customers were affected when Mobile Connections, owned by Bordesley Green-based Dialamobile, stopped trading.

They faced long contracts with phone service providers where they had to pay what was a previously free service.

But trading standards said that in most cases, no written contract existed.

Under the deals, customers would take out a deal with Dialamobile and would receive a bill from the service provider.

'No contracts'

Customers would then take the rental bill to Dialamobile which would give them cash back.

However, since the firm stopped trading, customers had had to pay the bill from the service provider.

Chris Neville, of Birmingham Trading Standards, said: "Customers can terminate the agreement that they have with the airtime company if they haven't got a contract with that airtime company.

"We think that in 99% of cases there aren't any contracts in existence. They should write to the airtime company giving a month's notice of their intention to terminate their direct debit and at that point stop paying.

"It's important as well that they also stop using that phone."

Our say: If you have been victim of the collapse of this company you have two options. You can either write to your network and tell them that because the original company has gone bust, you will be cancelling the direct debit. The second option is to call your network and explain the whole scenario to them. Because networks will always try to keep their customers, you maybe offered a small monthly line rental for the same number of minutes.

We have had information from our visitors that some providers are slashing line rentals from £35.00 to a mere £5.00 per month for the same number of minutes that were originally assigned.

Beware: There are also other companies that may be involved in this collapse. Our basic research also found out that a company called EverPlus Ltd is registered to the same address as the busted website mobilephonesontheweb.com. Further checks on the Internet found out that another website with the name of mobculture.com is also trying to defraud more people by luring them into 12 months free line rental offers. At this time, the status of the operation of this website is shown as offline.