beware of interactive millionaire

[nigelcraft]

on saturday 12th april i played along with the itv who wants to be a millionaire using my red button on my sky digital,at the end of the show you have to send your info which requires a connection to the telephone lines via your digibox ,eventually after 15 minutes i was successful in getting through to their lines as they were very busy and had to keep resending the information,no more was thought of until today when we recieved our phone bill and to our horror we were charged every time we tryed to connect to their system and the bill was over £20,had i known that i would be charged every time i tryed to connect to their system then i would not have used the service,i presumed you were only charged when you finally get through

i just would like to have known that i was being charged every time i sent the info even though the line was engaged (according to my sky digibox anyway) and to warn anyone else that this will happen

ive now got to find the money to pay this bill

[Gordon @ Convergent AV]

If the line is engaged then I don't think you should be charged. I'd complain to BT or your service provider

Gordon

[nigelcraft]

ive sent a few emails around,one to sky and couldnt find anywhere to send to itv,ntl who are our telephone line people say there is nothing they can do

[Starburst]

It sounds like everytime you attempted to make a connection you were successful but then were kicked because the servers that were being fed the data from the phone connection were too busy. It's the same sort of thing when dialing into an ISP and the handshake fails between your modem and their modem, you still have to pay the minimum connection charge. In this case that would be whatever NTL charge and for perhaps 1min of premium call rate which was used while the data was attempting to transfer.

Write to OFTEL.

Aye ... try Anne Robinson @ Watchdog as well ... she'll sort you out

[nigelcraft]

i have done,even better though ive had a reply from the makers of the show and they have told me that i should not have been charged for the calls that didnt connect and are investigating and will contact me about it soon