Telephone Scam - BEWARE

chateau42

I think that BT should not allow scam calls, or indeed any carriers should not allow scam calls. The history of BT is itself sufficient to show its complicity in making a lot of money from its customers. Hopefully it will find, like centrica, 1,000,000 customers in the last 12 months, waking up to its antics and leaving. >:(

barjam_2

i have just been reading all these post to me it sounds that if you pay more than £1.50 per min for any of these calls i think everyone should send their phone bills to icstis ha ha that would be a laugh

as for 'the christmas rush' i'm with you on this one you can never be to safe,

just hang up anyway........

Steve_xx

chateau42 Don't be too harsh on BT. They are very regulated and due to their dominant position they are prevented from highering their prices as they might wish or indeed lowering them to the extent of forcing the competition out of business. BT is in fact the goose that lays the golden egg, ie it is the only UK operator, forced by its licence terms to allow other operators to use its extensive infrastructure.

Don't begrudge BT making money from its customers. That's what it is in business to do. Far better to have this giant making money and profit and having it contribute to the UK tax coffers than having it as a state owned business which regularly turned in a loss and thus relied on the UK tax payer to fund it in order to keep it running.

I agree with others on this board in that BT, as well as other service providers, has an obligation to do all it can to prevent the scam of allowing premium rated calls to be made after installation of bogus diallers on pc's. However, at the end of the day it is likely that some people will actually want to subscribe to these services and therefore they should be free to do so. It should be possible for telephone companies to bar both premium rated (09) and international (00) digits from being dialled on a subscriber requested basis, and without charge. It should be possible to do this at exchange level or it should be possible for subscribers to dial a code to unlock the line on a call by call basis.

The proliferation of Premium Rated services is in some way due to the ever downward pressure on tariffs for landline to landline calls. Network service providers have sought to recover their falling revenue streams by the promotion of non-geogrphical and premium rated type calls.

jamie01892

According to BT's website, 09997 numbers are charged at £5.92! Look here (copy and paste):

http://www.bt.com/Pricing/pis_info.jsp?PRICE_OPTION=Residential/PIS_Specialised_Numbers/innertext/&showsub=PIS_Residential&showsub2=PIS_Specialised_Numbers&c_index=09

Steve_xx

According to BT's website, 09997 numbers are charged at £5.92!

There are no numbers issued under the 09997 code.