As expected, OfCom has fined GMTV lots of money over its dodgy phone in practices. The ITV breakfast station will have to pay a record £2 million. The company who actually ran the phone ins, Opera, had already been fined £250,000 by premium phone service regulator ICSTIS. OfCom said their fine would have been higher had GMTV not recently put into place new policies to stop such dodginess from happening again, and to refund those viewers who had been charged to phone in for competitions that had already closed. The previously reported resignations of GMTV MD Paul Corley and Head Of Competitions Kate Fleming over the whole debacle also possibly helped. But the regulator did say: "GMTV's disregard for the need to operate any reasonable compliance procedure, verification, oversight or management of the arrangements for the conduct of these competitions over such a long period of time could not, in the Committee's view, be described as anything other than gross negligence".
Sep 27, 2007
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1 min read
GMTV fined record £2 million by OfCom over phone-in debacle
Regulator OfCom has fined GMTV a record £2 million over its phone-in competitions, after the phone-line operator Opera was already fined £250,000 by ICSTIS.