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Ofcom fines Plusnet

March 23, 2017

Plusnet, an ISP owned by BT, has been fined £880,000 (€1.021m) for wrongly billing more than 1,000 former customers.

An investigation by regulator Ofcom found that the ISP broke a fundamental billing rule by continuing to charge a group of customers for landline and broadband after they had cancelled services. In total, customers were overcharged by more than £500,000.

Lindsey Fussell, Ofcom’s consumer group director, said: “There can be no margin for error, and no excuses, when it comes to billing customers correctly.  “This fine should serve as a reminder to telecoms companies that they must adhere to Ofcom’s billing rules at all times, or face the consequences.”

A spokeswoman for Plusnet said: “We are very sorry and would like to apologise to the 1,025 customers affected. We reported this ourselves to Ofcom and made every effort to contact these customers to arrange a full refund before the investigation started. We would also like to reassure all customers this was an isolated historic issue and we have implemented a number of new robust measures to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

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