A common loophole on ringtone websites means many people are downloading popular tunes without paying a penny, research shows.
Ringtone sellers could be losing more than 50m euros (£34.7m) a year through the loophole, said security firm QPass. Almost one-third of 100 European websites selling ringtones were vulnerable to the security lapse. QPass predicts that losses will grow as people look to download ever more types of data to their hi-tech handsets. Once downloaded, the ringtones can be easily transferred to a handset through a direct cable connection, on a memory card or via Bluetooth short-range radio technology. In total 35% of the sites tested by QPass let people get ringtones through this preview mechanism.