To compound matters, according to the Independent Commission for the Supervision of Standards of Telephone Information Services (ICSTIS), the calls did not terminate automatically when costs reached £20 – as they are supposed to under the ICSTIS Code of Practice – resulting in massive telephone bills.
PB Communications SR, the company at the centre of the complaint, denied that its dialler software could install itself on users' computers without consent or that calls could be made without approval. The company explained, according to ICSTIS, "that calls could only be made if users agreed to a disclaimer, set a PIN code and accepted the cost of the calls."
The company did accept that it had had a problem with the automatic termination due, it said, to a fault in the operating system, and agreed to refund customers with calls in excess of £20.
ICSTIS fined the company £10,000 and barred access to the service for six months.
The fine is a lot less than the £75,000 fine imposed on New York company BW Telecom in February, which was found guilty of sending spam e-mails that encouraged users unwittingly to connect to a premium rate dial-up service.