Rip-off phone companies are tricking households out of millions of pounds by charging hefty sums to connect them to official helplines.
Rogue firms are paying search engines so they appear at the top of results pages when people search for terms such as ‘contact HMRC’.
Customers in a rush end up calling expensive connection services instead of free or lower-cost direct lines.
Scam warning: Rip-off phone firms are paying to appear at the top of results pages. Auto-dial functions then entice people into making a call, but the huge fees are hidden in the small print
The companies’ websites often look professional and have auto-dial functions to entice people into making a call, but they hide their fees in the small print.
Experts fear more families could be caught out due to a spike in calls to key government agencies amid the pandemic.
Connection services are not illegal but they must be upfront about costs and are not allowed to mimic other organisations by using similar web addresses or logos.
Most charge £3.60 a minute plus connection charges for simply pushing calls through to company helplines.
These usually offer free numbers of their own or charge local call rates, which are included in most mobile or home phone bundles.
Complaints about these call-connection firms more than quadrupled last year and matched their 2018 levels within the first three months of 2020, according to the Phone-paid Services Authority (PSA).
‘Gobsmacking’ £135 fee to call Amazon
Jenny Harris was charged more than £135 for contacting Amazon via a rogue call-connection company
A pensioner was charged more than £135 for contacting Amazon via a rogue call-connection company.
Jenny Harris, 70, from Abersoch, North Wales, thought she was dialling a free number from Amazon’s website, but had in fact ended up on a page run by Salvatet Inversiones SL. She was charged £3.60 a minute for five calls.
Jenny only learned something was wrong after her landline was blocked the next day. ‘I was gobsmacked and angry,’ she says.
‘I had to come to an arrangement with my provider to pay it off over four months. I couldn’t afford to do it in one lump sum.’
Natalia Rola, meanwhile, was charged £80 by Salvatet for two calls to Thames Water, which customers can contact directly free of charge.
The 32-year-old says: ‘It must have been the first or second number that popped up [on Google]. I’m a student, so £80 is a lot of money for me. I’d never have used this service had I known.’
She reported it to the PSA, and says she has not received a refund but may take legal action.
One Spanish firm, Salvatet Inversiones SL, was fined £1 million earlier this month, after the PSA said it had not been clear about its charges and had treated customers unfairly.
It had charged callers £3.60 a minute to connect to government departments, utilities firms and customer services, and raked in more than £2.3 million between August 2018 and April 2020.
The PSA took action after it received more than 100 complaints about the company, one of which described the charges as ‘obscene and totally immoral’.
One customer received a bill of more than £350 for calls to O2, while another was charged £241 to call Trainline.
Customers in a rush end up calling expensive connection services, instead of free or lower-cost direct lines
Salvatet has been banned from the market for five years. It operated at least a dozen websites, including taxphonenumbers.com and energy-phonenumbers.com, which were promoted by Google adverts.
In March, Google said it would no longer allow ads for call-forwarding services.
But Money Mail found that costly connection services are still appearing at the top of results pages on Microsoft search engine Bing.
This happens when people search for the contact details of organisations including HMRC, Amazon, Thames Water, Three, O2, Santander, Halifax and HSBC.
One such connection service website, helplinecalling.com/hmrc, is run by A2B Telecom Ltd.
The firm says it also offers ‘hybrid’ numbers ‘where the caller gets charged a connection fee (of, say, £2) and then an ongoing per minute fee (of, say, £2)’.
In a pitch to businesses, it adds: ‘This can be a great way to earn off the callers that do not stay on the line for more than a few seconds.’
Director Lawrence Bingham says it provides a link for customers to access HMRC’s free or lower-cost numbers directly, and that its service helps callers obtain contact details that are otherwise hard to find.
There is no suggestion the company is acting illegally, but it is part of an industry that generated £21 million in 2018-2019 alone, according to the PSA.
A surge in complaints prompted the regulator to bring in strict new rules around marketing and costs in December.
In January, it fined ECN Digital Ltd £250,000 for duping customers out of £90,000. Its website used pictures of some companies’ logos, so it wasn’t clear to consumers whether they were phoning a call-connection service or the company directly.
Jo Prowse, chief executive of the PSA, says using these firms ‘can cost you a lot of money, just for you to be put through to an organisation with a free or low-cost customer service line’.
She adds: ‘We’re concerned that in these difficult times, consumers may fall foul of a rogue service.’
A Microsoft spokesman says Bing will take action to remove adverts if they do not comply with its policies.
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