Iliad Admits Mistake on Top 170 Plus and Refunds Customers Activation Cost

The Advertising Jury has rejected the commercial communication used by Iliad Italia to promote the mobile offers Top 170 Plus and Top 250 Plus, ordering its cessation. The ruling, number 15 of 2026 and dated June 23, 2026, followed a complaint from WindTre and particularly concerns the winback SMS and radio spots broadcast by Iliad.

In the published statement on the website of the Institute of Advertising Self-Regulation, the Jury deemed the advertising messages for Top 170 Plus at €7.99 per month and Top 250 Plus at €9.99 per month in violation of three articles of the Self-Regulation Code: Article 2, relating to misleading commercial communication, Article 15, on comparisons, and Article 20, concerning special sales.

Iliad Refunds Activation Cost for Top 170 Plus Iliad Italia has chosen to respond publicly to the decision, admitting the mistake. In an official note, the operator acknowledged that it had made an oversight in sending a commercial communication, forgetting to include the activation cost of the offer in the text. According to the company, it was a material error and not a deliberate marketing choice, which affected a limited number of SMS sent only once to former customers who had consented to marketing.

The contested message referred to the ad with Megan Gale and invited former customers to return with the offer of 170GB in Italy plus 17GB extra in Europe at €7.99 per month, vaguely indicating that there were "very few days left" to activate it, without mentioning either the exact expiration date or the activation cost of the SIM, set at a one-time €9.99. This dual omission convinced the Jury of the non-compliance of the communication.

According to reports from Iliad, the SMS had been sent during the last days of availability of Top 170 Plus, an offer that could be subscribed to from April 2 to May 19, 2026. The operator emphasizes that it had already intervened before the Jury's ruling, modifying the message text to explicitly include both the expiration date and the activation cost.

On a voluntary basis, Iliad has decided to refund the activation cost to all former customers who, after receiving the first version of the SMS lacking the missing information, had subscribed to the Top 170 Plus offer at €7.99 per month. The refund, amounting to €9.99, therefore concerns exclusively those who were reached by the SMS campaign subject to the complaint.

This incident adds to a series of interventions by the Advertising Jury on the commercial communications of Italian telecommunications operators, a sector where winback offers, designed to recover former customers, are often at the center of reports from competitors. It is worth noting that the Jury's decision has a self-regulatory nature and does not replace any interventions by the competent authorities regarding advertising and consumer protection, but remains a reference closely followed by the operators in the sector.