Sex and chat lines cost business £25m a year

Employees
using premium rate phone lines for personal use at work cost businesses £25m a
year.

Craig
Rowland of British Telecom (BT) Business said BT’s researchers found staff are
making 15,000 calls to sex and chat lines every hour, amounting to a total of
35 million calls being made to premium rate phone lines last year.

Financial
advisers, car dealers and hotel staff are most likely to calls to the lines,
which cost about £1.50 a minute.

Employees
in London, Birmingham, Leicester and Chelmsford are racking up the biggest
bills, with staff in Wrexham, Milton Keynes and Sheffield using their phones in
the most legitimate way.

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BT
has launched Billing Analyst and Call Alert services to allow subscribers to
monitor premium rate calls to try and eliminate the problem.

By
Michael Millar