What is 'slamming'?

'Slamming’ is the most severe form of mis-selling. Slamming occurs when your service is transferred to a new telephone company without your knowledge or consent.

Examples of slamming:

• Your service is transferred without you being contacted
• Your service is changed without you having even been contacted by your ‘new company’ (in rare cases sales staff have been known to forge potential customers’ signatures to make a sale)
• You were contacted but gave no permission
• The company contacts you, and your service is transferred to them even though you haven’t given your permission. For example, you are sometimes asked to sign “for more information” and then your signature is used to transfer the service
• You signed up for a different product or service
• You actually agree to buy products or services from a new company, but the service you are given is not the one you asked for
• You wanted a new service, but were deliberately misled about the identity of the company you were making an agreement with
• You discover, after agreeing to transfer your service, that the ‘new company’ is not the company described to you at the time of the sale

Other mis-selling

Apart from slamming, there are other forms of mis-selling that primarily involve mis-representation (eg if you are misled as to the relationship between the “new” telephone company and BT) or pressurised selling.

• You’ve been put under pressure
• If you’ve been pressurised, either over the phone or on your doorstep, into transferring your service
• You’ve been given misleading company information
• If you are told that ‘BT has sold its customers’ to the new company, or that ‘Ofcom has ordered BT to transfer its customers’ to them.
• You’ve had to buy the service just to get information
• If you’ve been told that, to get information about its services, you have to transfer your calls or your calls and line rental and then cancel the new service if you don’t want it

The action you can take depends on the type of mis-selling you have experienced and when it happened.