Barclaycard fined over mute calls

IT IS WITH SOME JOY that we report that Ofcom has today fined Barclaycard the maximum amount possible (£50,000) for
breaching its rules on silent and abandoned calls.

We say that because as a home workers, pretty much the only calls we ever get on the land-line are from machines, Indian call centres ('on behalf of 3', mostly) or are dead because there's no-one on the other end of the line. These could well be from Barclaycard as that firm rings us up from time to time with real people on the line too.

These mute calls are a pain in the butt. But most are not generated with malicious intent, according to Ofcom. They apparently occur when call centres using automated calling systems generate more calls than their available agents can deal with. When the person called answers the telephone, there is no agent available, resulting in silence on the line.

Ofcom investigated Barclaycard from 1 October 2006 to 10 May 2007 and found that it had made an extremely high number of silent calls where the people receiving the calls had no method of knowing who had made them.

The investigation also found that some of Barclaycard's call centres had no procedures in place to prevent people receiving repeated abandoned calls over a short period of time.

Ofcom Chief Executive Ed Richards said: "Taken as a whole this is the most serious case of persistent misuse by making silent and abandoned calls that Ofcom has ever investigated. Had we not been limited by the statutory maximum, we would have imposed a larger financial penalty to reflect this misuse."

We wondered what Barclaycard might have to say for itself so we called the company repeatedly over a period of three days to get comment, but whenever they got out of the shower to answer the phone, we hung up. µ

L'Inq
hwww.ofcom.org.uk.