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Fraudhelpline.org fined, reprimanded and barred for three months following Police complaint
A premium-rate phone service, advertised online as "The UK's Fraud Helpline" , has been shut down for three months and fined £50,000 following a complaint from the City of London Police.
A Detective Superintendent complained to PhonepayPlus, the national regulator of premium-rate phone services, after noticing that the website Fraudhelpline.org was advertising on the search engine Google so it would appear as a sponsored link when users searched for "national fraud reporting centre".
The National Fraud Reporting Centre is a new Police initiative, unconnected with this website, designed to allow the victims of online fraud to report it to a central body.
PhonepayPlus tested the service by phoning to ask about a fraudulent transaction on a credit card. The service advised that it should contact the bank issuing the credit card and asked, despite being told that the payment had been taken by an electrical store, whether the charge could be related to a card-protection service.
The cost of this advice, which required three calls to be made to premium-rate phone numbers, was £24.
PhonepayPlus said the Google advertising and website were "likely to mislead consumers into believing the service was an official one and not a commercial service", and that the company "had not made it clear enough to the consumer that this advice was available for free from other sources".
It found the service to be in breach of three sections of the Code of Practice: two relating to Fairness, and one relating to Delay. PhonepayPlus has issued a formal reprimand, fined the operator £50,000 and barred the service f or at least three months.
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justice to be done
and people we shall await the outcome of the apeal the helpline did on the 26th November. I Provided evidence to the regulators (phone pay plus) recently after i decided enough was enough working as general manager for this rather shoddy company......I have advised that the maximum fine to be imposed should be £250 000 due to the helpline providing information for other services over a premium rate including benefits,grants, passports, paypal, ebay, phones, gadgets and many more. This company explot people who are in need of help and advice which can also be found elsewhere for free on the internet. they have a large number of callers as they pay google a lot of money to be top in the google search listings....for instance if you were to type in "havent been paid child benefit" the helplines number would come up top rather than the goverment departments and you would get through to an in experienced operator ....you would probably get through to same operator if you typed in "havent received paypal payment
Posted by Rory Wells, 29 Nov 2009