Barclaycard fined for silent calls to customers

Regulators have slapped the maximum possible fine on British credit card operator Barclaycard for bothering customers with telephone calls even when it does not have enough staff to deal with them.

Communications Regulator Ofcom said it had fined the unit of British bank Barclays 50,000 pounds and would have liked to impose a bigger penalty.

"Taken as a whole, this is the most serious case of persistent misuse by making silent and abandoned calls that Ofcom has ever investigated," Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards said in a statement.

"Had we not been limited by the statutory maximum, we would have imposed a larger financial penalty to reflect this misuse".

Ofcom said such calls were not usually malicious and occur when automated systems in call centres generate more calls than staff can deal with, meaning that customers are met with silence when they answer the phone.

"Silent calls are a significant cause of inconvenience and anxiety for thousands of people every month," Ofcom said.

Ofcom said it investigated Barclaycard from October 2006 to May 2007 and found it had made an extremely high number of silent calls where customers had no means of knowing who was calling them.

In some cases they received repeated calls.

Barclaycard said in a statement that it did not dispute Ofcom's findings and apologised to its customers.

"Many of these calls were made with the intention of bringing potentially fraudulent activity to the attention of the card holder," Barclaycard said in a statement.

"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."

Barclaycard said it had made "robust and lasting changes" to its processes.