Npower fined £60,000 for persistent nuisance calls

Npower is the latest energy company to be fined by the regulator, this time for nuisance calls.

Energy giant Npower has been fined £60,000 by the regulator Ofcom after it was found to have made repeated abandoned calls to customers.

The calls made by Npower between 1st February and 21st March 2011 were found to be in breach of legislation found in the Communications Act 2003 and Ofcom rules.

An abandoned call means when a customer picks up the phone they will hear pre-recorded information rather than an actual human voice. Npower was also found guilty of playing marketing messages to customers during some of these calls.

Automatic diallers are used by companies to make abandoned calls to maximise the number of people they can reach. But there is a limit imposed by Ofcom on the number of these calls a company can make.

Ofcom says Npower will be providing compensation to those who have suffered because of this. Those affected will be contacted and will receive a £10 high street shopping voucher.

The maximum fine for making too many of these calls was raised to £2 million in September 2010.

Isolated incident

Npower has apologised and said: “We have good controls in place and believe that these instances were isolated exceptions.”

With regards to the marketing messages, it said: "We included the message to help explain why we were calling but we accept the finding and had already removed these words in early July last year."

E.ON fines

Npower is not the only energy company to be fined recently. Last month E.ON was ordered to pay back £1.4 million to customers who had been wrongly overcharged.

This was due to a mistake in the pricing and affected around 94,000 customers which were identified and contacted.

What do you think about the latest fine? Is it enough? Let us know in the comment box below.

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