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Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/financialservices/0,3800010322,39295113,00.htm

Silent calls cost Barclaycard £50,000
Ofcom decides silence is most definitely not golden

By Jo Best

Published: Monday 29 September 2008

Barclaycard has been fined £50,000 by telecoms regulator Ofcom for making silent calls.

The fine, the maximum penalty Ofcom can hand down for breaching rules on silent and abandoned calls, followed an "extremely high number of silent calls" made by the card company's call centres.

Under Ofcom's guidelines, no more than three per cent of all calls made in any 24-hour period must be abandoned and any such calls must carry a short recorded message telling the recipient who is behind the call.

An investigation by the regulator between 1 October 2006 to 10 May 2007 uncovered an above average amount of silent calls by Barclaycard, without any accompanying message to identify the source of the calls.

According to Ofcom, some of Barclaycard's call centres had no way of preventing multiple abandoned calls being made to the same number over a short period of time.

Ofcom chief exec Ed Richards said that, had the watchdog been able, it would have handed down a larger fine to the card company.

"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," he said in a statement.

Barclaycard said it does not dispute the fine and accepts Ofcom's findings.

Barclaycard said: "Many of these calls were made with the intention of bringing potentially fraudulent activity to the attention of the cardholder. Nevertheless, we recognise that all calls, irrespective of the purpose, should be made in the right way and we accept that our processes, in place at the time of the review by Ofcom, were inadequate. As a result, we offer a full apology for any inconvenience and distress to our customers that these calls caused."