Our called number 01253 316238 is registered with TPS as not wishing to receive unsolicited calls. We received an unsolicited call at 11.55 on Saturday 12 March 2005. The call was a recorded message purporting that I had won a prize, albeit in a competition I had not entered. There was also no mention that the prize claim number was a premium rate number. I believe this breaks at least one rule or law, and consider the practice to be fraudulent.
Telephone number of service : 09041 940213
Where advertised : Cold call by their operator
Did you or someone in you household call the service : No
Do you give permission for us to pass on these details to the service provider : Yes

This is what we know about the number you entered (09041940213).
We do not have any specific information about this number at present. However we can tell you the following.

• This is classified as a Special Services, open ended time dependent charge or fixed fee up to £1.50 for BT customers number.
• It is provided by Switch Services Ltd.
• And costs £1.50pm [in pence or pounds where 'pm' means 'per minute' and 'pc' means 'per call'].

Our Opinion
We have never heard of Switch Services before, but our guess is that they are crooks.
It is against ICSTIS rules, and possibly illegal, to operate or advertise a premium rate telephone number without a clear warning that the number to be called is a premium rate number.
The call we received was clearly in breach of this rule, and will have been carefully designed. It is therefore beyond reasonable doubt that the operators know precisely what they are doing, and are happy to break the law, and stick two fingers up at it. Jail would be too good for them. While this may sound extreme, please spend a short time considering how much time telephone spam wastes. Probably millions of man-hours. Then consider the thousands of pounds the crooks running these scams make, possibly ten, or hundreds of thousands of pounds, even millions.
If Switch Services are not crooks, why are they flouting ICSTIS rules, and the law?

Complain! We urge you to complain to ICSTIS, and possibly to your MP or others about any such spam you receive. You could also try complaining about the telephone companies who allow these scams to proliferate, by permitting the operators to work with them. We saw an excellent newspaper article recently setting out exactly what laws the telephone operators break.

ICSTIS
As we mention above ICSTIS stands for "The Independent Committee for the Supervision of Standards of Telephone Information Services". They have an excellent website where, amongst other things, you can make online complaints about telephone fraud such as the above. It is www.icstis.org.uk