Zamano

» see zamano.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Zamano plc posted a page to its own website on 14 November 2018 titled "Zamano plc, In Voluntary Liquidation". It was filed under News, like a product launch. Four weeks earlier, on 17 October, the same site had posted the circular calling the extraordinary general meeting where shareholders would vote on winding the company up. A liquidator took over in early 2019.

The company had started in Dublin in 2000 and spent its first years assembling the raw material of the premium SMS business. In 2002 it partnered with RTÉ Interactive on mobile and text-based games, then bought Avoca's interactive SMS arm, which came with ten premium rate short codes reaching four UK mobile networks. Those short codes were the asset. In 2007 it added Red Circle Technologies and Eirborne.

Then it went public twice. Trading started on London's AIM in October 2006, and in February 2007 Zamano was the first listing of the year on the Irish exchange. For a decade it was a small-cap mobile content company with real revenue, a sector that in Ireland and Britain meant competitions and subscription services billed straight onto a phone bill.

That billing mechanism is the whole story. A customer never typed in card details, never saw a checkout, and often never knowingly agreed to anything. The charge simply appeared on the mobile account. It worked beautifully until the complaints reached a regulator with the power to fine.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the fines ~

PhonepayPlus, which policed premium rate phone services in the UK, reprimanded and fined Zamano £15,000 on 4 February 2010 for breaching its code over unsolicited reverse-charge text messages, and ordered refunds. On 29 March 2012 it fined the company £35,000 for the same category of breach, this time over ringtone downloads carrying recurring charges. Between May 2012 and September 2013 it collected 587 complaints about a competition service called Play2Win, from consumers who said they had received unsolicited reverse-billed texts, or who had engaged with something they believed was free. The tribunal found breaches of the code's Fairness and Misleading provisions and, citing the repeat offending, raised the fine to £40,000.

The mechanism that paid Zamano's bills reached Turkey too, in the same years and trailing the same kind of complaint, which is why none of this reads as foreign to me. What did not reach Turkey was Zamano. Its short codes were provisioned on British and Irish networks, and the regulator whose rulings kept landing on it was British. The thing traveled; the company stayed home.

~ the day it died ~

In February 2017 the board decided to bring the premium rate SMS lines to a close before 2018 arrived, which meant voluntarily switching off the revenue. The Irish Times reported the collapse in revenue and profits that followed. By September 2017, after a management buyout, the remaining entity was reportedly looking at investing in oil and gas exploration companies, which is what a cash shell does when it has money and no business. Trading in the shares was suspended on 9 March 2018.

What was left voted itself closed in November. The liquidation was a members' voluntary one, the solvent kind: shareholders divided the remainder and went home, with no creditor involved in any of it. There was still money in the company on the day it stopped.

The website outlived all of it. Type zamano.com in today and a WordPress install nobody has touched in years comes back, a navigation bar still promising mobile messaging and payments, and a meta description explaining that Zamano is an Irish plc classified as an AIM Rule 15 cash shell. The company has been gone since 2018, and the page has never been changed to say so.

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