16-10-2008
INFORMATION service 118118 had an unexpected problem this week when it was faced with large numbers of customers who refused to accept £118 as part of a 'thank you' campaign, leaving over £10,000 which literally cannot be given away.
Of the total of 288 winners, 89 (29%) of those called refused to accept the prize money. The most common response was suspicion caused by rise of fraudulent spam and scam calls - people have been 'spamaged', meaning they simply refused to take the money.
118 118 operators are now struggling to convince the winners in the hope that they will take the cash. The situation has reached the point that 118118 has now had to post all of the winners names on their website www.118.com in the hope that they will claim their prize money.
Says 118118 Director of Communications, William Ostrom "It was the strangest thing, we were calling people to give them the money they were refusing - in these credit crunched times, we couldn't even give money away. It appears that people's wariness has been caused by experience of fraudulent calls, spam and 'too good to be true' offers with strings attached. We are planning to repeat our offer in November to give away much more, £1,180,000, so we hope we don't have the same problem again."
ENDS
