Onestream slammed for 'slamming' vulnerable and elderly folk: That's £35k to Ofcom, please Imagine a telco kicking down your front door, yelling "all your bills are belong to us" then leaving. In the industry parlance, it's known as "slamming" and Ofcom has fined Onestream £35,000 for the practice. An investigation by the UK comms regulator found that the Hampshire-based broadband and landline minnow, launched 2018 …
Why no jail time , these bastards can easilly afford 30 K whereas 6 months in the slammer, for a first offence at least, would probably change their future ideas.
At the moment they have nothing to worry about, except how to scam a further 30k to cover their immediate losses.
Maybe that would have been due to the monopoly that Post Office Telephones had.
A few years back in Spain, if you used the word si in any conversation while talking to one of Vodafone's telesales people, they would switch you to whatever they were trying to flog because you said 'yes'.
My thoughts too essentially they have gained access to customer bank accounts by fraud, levied charges which were never agreed to by the other party and gathered information on people without consent.
In which way does this warrant a £30K fine? They should be shut down and the directors personally liable for compensation. What's the point in having a watchdog with no teeth?
Taking money for a service you didn't ask for sounds a lot like theft. I really struggle to work out how these people don't end up in court on a theft charge.
On a different note, kudos to the regulator/legislators for making it 10% of _turnover_ rather than _profit_. We all know how quickly companies suddenly discover their profit is zero when the treasury come looking for their slice. *cough* amazon *cough*
I suppose the penalty is so mild only because there's no way to prove that the company actually condoned the practice. It could have been done in violation of the rules by "lazy" employees trying to meet an impossible sales quota.
Just enough deniability to prevent what should happen in cases like this: the company is confiscated from its owners, so that it ceases to exist while service continues to be provided to its customers.
But still, at least there could have been laws on the books that would send the call center employee who switched their services over without authorization to prison for up to 14 years. This wouldn't be as good as putting those in charge of the company in prison, but it would still have the effect of preventing this from happening again - as they would find no employees willing to do that kind of thing, if it is what they wanted.
I assumed that Vodafone had "sold me" to Onecom since I still pay vodafone, log into vodafone etc. However, I cannot run the vodafone app on my portable, nor can Vodafone reps do anything with my account. That being said, Onecom have not been that bad to deal with recently e.g. getting a new sim. They answered the phone call pretty quickly.
Sorry, but there was no mistake there. This was a calculated and programmed operation with a specific target market, and the people responsible for putting this in place should definitely go to jail.
And the CEO should be first in line, because that's where the buck stops.
Our society is not going get better any time soon if we can't teach the right lesson to the criminals in white collars.
"Proven and respected industry professionals" are renowned for chasing after key positions in companies with small turnovers and massive reputational damage. It's a well known fact. They rush to answer recruitment ads such as: "Proven and respected industry professionals urgently needed to replace knuckle-dragging sociopaths on our payrol."
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