Oct 19th 2007
By: Russ
By: Russ
ITV Quiz / Phone-in Fakery hits Ofcom’s reputation
UPDATE #2: The Serious Fraud Office say they are investigating…
UPDATE Friday 19 Oct: Scotland Yard say they will launch a criminal investigation if Ofcom ask for one. FT covers the story here.
Oh and there is a new poll up — to the right of this page — any opinions?
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It was not a good day for ITV today. I thought Michael Grade performed very poorly in this Channel 4 interview (which I have edited to make him look even more squirmy than he did on TV):
Even more interesting were Jon Snow’s comments that — due to its refusal to consider these fraudsters as criminals — Ofcom seem to have demonstrated it cannot be trusted to deal with this issue squarely.
Oct 19th 2007
Time to can Ofcom - waste of time, money and paper! Too focused on blue skies thinking rather than doing a hard day’s work enforcing the regulations already in place. Rubbish.
Oct 21st 2007
Re: The Premium Rate Industry and the role of the Regulators (Ofcom and Icstis aka PHonePayPlus). In whose interest do they act?
If their role is to protect the consumer from corrupt industry practices they have clearly failed.
Over recent years the “Industry” has been involved in unknown millions of pounds of consumer harm in the form of internet “rogue diallers”, unsolicited reverse billed text messages, various missed call scams, mis-selling of ring tone subscriptions services to children and now these TV phone-in scandals.
Isn’t it time the media and MP’s started to question the role the regulators play in the success of these Industry scams and frauds. Why hasn’t a single company been the subject of a police investigation? It’s also interesting to note that the directors of some of the worst offending companies also sit on the Icstis board.
Oct 23rd 2007
I would say OFCOM were fairly ineffective. I once complained to them about the gameshow ‘The Vault’. This was televised between the years 2002 and 2004 on ITV1.
The phone-in process was blatantly corrup.
The response I received from OFCOM were that they could not investigate it as the show had ended so ar back and that they were unable to obtain recordings for it.
OFCOM have been showing their teeth a little more just lately but it is only a reaction to a growing sense of outrage at the televion industry throughout the population. I think in the past they were carefully not to upset media bosses.