According to the report on the governing of the charges of telecommunications service providers released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China on August 5, 2008, four service providers were suspended, pending rectification, in the second quarter of 2008.
The report shows that in the second quarter of 2008, 120 irregular telecommunications service providers received criticisms, rectification orders and administrative punishments. Of those, four providers that had serious irregularities were ordered to suspend their operations for rectification. The four companies are Beijing Mobile Multimedia Co., Ltd; Beijing Dongfang Yinglian Technology Co., Ltd; Guangzhou Microservice Computer Technologies Co., Ltd; and Beijing MTY Information Technology Co., Ltd. The reasons for suspending the four service providers are that they sent fake mobile spam messages to lure users to use their services and charged fees without the consent of the users.
According to the statistics of the telecommunications complaint center of MIIT, the total number of complaints in the second quarter of 2008 was 8,728, an increase of 7.7% compared with the first quarter. Of these complaints, disputes about the charges of service providers were 1,397, a decrease of 13.6% compared with the first quarter. The complaints mainly involved provinces and cities of Guangdong, Hebei, Shandong, Beijing, Fujian, Jiangsu, Henan, Sichuan, Shaanxi, Jilin and Heilongjiang.
In addition, during the second quarter, Chinese telecom operators stopped cooperating with 99 service providers. Of these service providers, 94 are partners of China Mobile, 101 are partners of China Unicom, four are partners of China Telecom and 20 are partners of China Netcom.