Out-Law / Your Daily Need-To-Know
Ofcom has fined Britain's biggest credit card company Barclaycard £50,000 over silent phone calls made on behalf of the company. The telecoms regulator called Barclaycard's behaviour "the most serious" silent calls case it had ever investigated.
Silent calls happen when companies using call centres place more calls to households than they have staff to be ready at the end of the line. Some call recipients are faced with a silent phone line because nobody at the call centre is ready to make the call when the system automatically dials the number.
"Taken as a whole this is the most serious case of persistent misuse by making silent and abandoned calls that Ofcom has ever investigated," said Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards.
Ofcom's rules say that silent calls must not constitute more than 3% of the calls made in any marketing campaign in any 24 hour period. The rules also state that a recorded message must tell recipients who has made the call.
Ofcom investigated Barclaycard's use of automatic calling systems between October 2006 and May 2007 and found that it had made "an extremely high number" of silent calls in that period.
The investigation also found that recipients had no way to know who was behind the calls.
The Barclaycard fine is the maximum that Ofcom was permitted to levy and the biggest fine ever handed out for silent calling. Richards said that he would have increased the fine had he been allowed.
"Had we not been limited by the statutory maximum, we would have imposed a larger financial penalty to reflect this misuse," he said.
Barclaycard said that it had changed its processes and was now compliant with Ofcom's rules.
Ofcom has previously fined a number of other companies over silent and abandoned calls, including Abbey National, Complete Credit Management, Space Kitchens, Bracken Bay Kitchens, Carphone Warehouse and Toucan, it said.
Ofcom's guidance on the persistent misuse of an electronic communications network says that companies should ensure that they are:
limiting abandoned calls to a rate not exceeding three per cent of all live calls made on each individual campaign over a 24 hour period;
playing a brief information message giving details about any call answered before an agent is available;
providing calling line identification (CLI) information on outbound calls, so that consumers are able to make a return call;
[leaving] a 72-hour period before a telephone number receiving an abandoned call may be called again without the guaranteed presence of an agent; and
[letting] unanswered calls must ring for a minimum of 15 seconds.
