8 BT Engineers Arrested for Fake UK Car Clamping Business

Police in West London have arrested eight of BTOpenreach’s telecoms engineers and another thirty have been suspended after bosses at BT were allegedly tipped off about a fake car clamping business that had netted the fraudsters around £200,000.

According to The Sun, vans belonging to BTOpenreach have to pay around £1 million worth of fines in London every year. This is because engineers often have little choice but to park in restricted areas while carrying out vital broadband and phone repairs.

Apparently the fraudsters found a way of manipulating this by creating fake claims that parking wardens had ticketed their vans when in fact they had not. On top of that the engineers were also found to be wrongly claiming overtime pay.

The City of London Police confirmed the arrests and noted that eight of the workers were now out on bail. BT has refused to comment but it’s believed that the incident came to light following an internal probe and tip-off. The suspension of 30 engineers probably won’t affect broadband maintenance and upgrades in West London too drastically but it certainly won’t help.

In other news.. anytime call over-charging

In unrelated news Ofcom are separately said to be probing BT after customers with their Anytime Calls service claimed that they were being over-charged by 1 pence for calls to mobile phones. Related customers should pay 21p for a short mobile call but some were paying 22p, which might not sound like much until you multiply that by several million customers and lots of related calls.

A spokesman for BT told The Guardian that this was due to the way it handled VAT and rounded-up call charges, “The way our system rounds up the cost of calls to full minutes and pennies can sometimes have the effect of adding a maximum of 1p to a call of any duration. Our tariff guide on bt.com explains clearly how we do this, but we are happy to review how we inform customers about this small financial anomaly as we are always keen to be open and transparent with our customers.”

Ofcom said that it doesn’t regulate related retail prices or how BT’s rounding policies are applied. But the regulator did confirm that it was engaging with BT over the concerns, although this is less of an investigation and more of an effort to improve the operators charging transparency