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Edinburgh Live
Edinburgh Live
National
Malvika Padin & Dayna McAlpine

EE, O2, Vodafone and Sky charging pricey hidden fees despite new law, warns expert

Millions of Brits use phone-paid services every year - whether it's for voting for your favourite contestant on a reality TV show or using a psychic or adult chat line.

These services are usually access by dialling a premium-rate phone numbers - but now new standards from the Phone-paid Services Authority (PSA) will give more protection to consumers using these services.

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Set to be introduced on Tuesday, April 5, phone-paid service providers will be given support to "achieving compliance and preventing harm from occurring".

However, there are no plans to address the hidden access fees charged by network providers, according to interactive TV broadcaster Visional Media.

Currently when you dial any premium rate number, your network provider such as Vodafone, O2, EE, and Sky is able to charge you whatever it likes as an access fee on top of the charge for calling.

These access fees don't have anything to do with the service you're calling, and they don't need to be advertised upfront by your network provider either. This means you don't know about them until you receive your phone bill.

Alex Campbell from Visional Media, which runs popular chat service Xpanded TV on Sky and Freeview, explained: "We do our best to keep prices as low as we can, because we want customers to have fun calling our chat lines. But right now, network providers are taking our customers for extortionate amounts in access charges."

He added this is unfair on both customers as well as businesses, saying that in some cases the network providers are charging customers triple the amount that Visional does, which in turn puts people off from calling in to the service.

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