Fax, plugs and rock 'n' roll

Fax-back offers rival scratchcard competitions as the most complained-about premium rate phone line. They topped the list of complaints received last year by industry-funded watchdog, the independent committee for the supervision of standards of telephone information services (Icstis), and run a close second this year.

The fax-back scam works in two different ways. One is that an offer comes out of your fax machine plugging a hard-to-believe deal - for example, cheap tickets to one of this week's U2 concerts - which can only be obtained by immediately sending a fax back to the company. The fax number you are asked to dial is a highly expensive premium rate line.

The other scam is to send requests to a company asking for information, which usually require pages and pages to be faxed back - again at a premium rate cost.

Since the 1998 Data Protection Act, it has been harder to target individuals. The act states that you must have the individual's prior consent to send a fax.

So the fax-back operators have shifted their focus to businesses, making a large part of their estimated £28m annual turnover from hotels and restaurants, which are asked to send menu and booking information on £1-a-minute lines, and unsolicited offers of sport and concert tickets to any corporate fax number they can get hold of.

A perfect example is a couple phoning up a hotel, saying they are getting married and asking for information to be faxed to them. What the happy couple forget to add is that the line is an 090 premium rate number and, oh, they don't actually have any intention of getting married.

Another example is a make-believe company phoning an estate agent, saying it is planning on relocating to the area and asking for its property lists to be faxed. Larger estate agents have tens, if not hundreds, of properties on their books, and run up big phone bills fulfilling these requests.

Last week, Icstis fined four Bournemouth-based companies £10,000 each for operating these lines; another is being investigated, but tracking down the culprits is not easy. Spokesperson Rob Dwight explains: "Icstis thinks the same individual is behind all the Bournemouth companies, but it's difficult to police because the companies all have different trading names and they can change the network they operate from."

(Curiously, trading standards officers have also tracked down the bogus holiday offer from Holidays Direct, featured last week in Jobs & Money, to a seedy office above a Chinese restaurant in Bournemouth.)

In the meantime, as the reader's letters detailed in the box show, premium rate fax-back services continue to annoy and confound an uninterested public.

If your fax number is for personal use, the data protection act should protect you from unsolicited faxes unless you have given prior consent.

The problem is, you can unwittingly give prior consent. Order forms for a catalogue or subscription forms to a magazine often have small boxes at the bottom of the slip which you tick if you do not want to receive mail from "carefully selected partner companies". Forget to tick the box and your details can end up on commercially available mailing lists.

In theory, individuals and companies can register with the fax preference service - operated by the premium rate industry's direct marketing association - if they want to stop receiving unsolicited faxes. But this doesn't always stop the flow.

Icstis' code of practice places some wide boundaries around the fax-back operators. Unsolicited offers have to have at least a vague relevance to the company they are sent to. Offering football tickets to an undertaker, for example, might be a bit questionable. And, of course, the fax must clearly state that it's an 090 number and what the likely cost of the call/length of the fax, might be.

The watchdog is thinking about making operators put pricing information in the middle of the page so it does not get cut off the bottom. It also looks into the fax transmission speeds used by operators, although if it's your fax that's slow, it's deemed to be your problem.

And it claims to be clamping down on operators who fax back information you requested - after six or seven pages of stuff you didn't.

• Icstis helpline: 0800 500 212. Fax preference service: 0845 070 0702.