I recently joined sky talk and on my last 2 bills there has been 2 premium rate calls and 1 NGN call that my partner and I have no idea what they are. They all come under the name of Thus Plc , the premium rate call cost us £5.58 which is pretty annoying seen as the bill would only have been £4 for calls without this unknown number. Has anyone else had this Thus Plc show up on there bill

I know with BT you can bar premium rate calls and I was wondering if I could do this with Sky Talk

One of the numbers is 08452129003 and when I just phoned it there was just a load of daft dialling noises

The other 2 are 09061582175 and 09012920050
Last edited by A.M : 03-08-2007 at 23:11

Thus are an ISP. So I presume that the 0845 number you tried dialling was their dial-up number. Have you got a modem (dial-up, not broadband) connected to your phoneline?

I'm 99.9% sure we haven't got one connected. The call that cost us over £5 said something about a scratch card game when I phoned it and my partner and I have both not phoned it and no one else has access to our home to use the line.

As posted above Thus Plc is an ISP and phone company that used to be part of the Scottish Power group a few years back.

Darren

Is your Sky box still connected to the landline? If so, are you sure one or more of these calls wasn't/weren't made via that?

I use a CPS calls provider too but have 09 numbers barred on the underlying BT line and have added a 1280 prefix to the Telephone Settings on my digibox (Services, 401 Select, 3) - so anyone trying to play premium rate games or whatever on the digibox can't get through.

Our sky box is connected to the phoneline but we haven't played any games etc on it , we've just used the view bill option etc

How does the Sky Talk bill arrive? Email, post? I have not had a bill yet?

Your sky talk bill will arrive with the rest of your sky bill.
Sky can bar premium rate calls for you but they can't do it without barring international as well.
If you're unsure what the premium rate number is this site may be of interest http://www.icstis.org.uk .

Dear A. M

I too have that number on my BT phone bill (09012920050) - the date for it is 28th March this year and it's something to do when you press the red button on your digibox (if you have one) - that number on my phone bill was when I entered a contest on Living TV Most Haunted Live - so it could be for the same thing when they had a live show last year (Most Haunted that is lol)

Hope this helps
Last edited by Misterbump2008 : 06-05-2008 at 12:10

Interesting. I refer A.M to post #6 in that case - the solution to the 09 calls problem - albeit 9 months late now.

always safer to just disconnect the sky box phone lead.
Reconnect when required once per month to maintain the channels on the box.

My phone lead has been disconnected for years and has never been plugged back in for anything, and I haven't lost any channels.

Everybody should unplug their phone lead at all times unless they want to be ripped off by these competitions, quizzes, 08 telephone numbers, etc.

Phone lead is not required to retain channels, it's only used for ordering PPV events or movies, using some paid for interactive service and if you have multi-room so they know the boxes are at the same address.

It's a myth some people seem to spread that it's need to maintain channels on the box.

You think Sky are going to go through the expense of dialling in to each box all the time to keep the channel list maintained? There are satellites in the Sky - the ones Sky use to broadcast channels on, they simply transmit the data via satellite and hit all the boxes in one go, not dial up almost 8 million phonelines.

We had our first box installed 1 Oct 1998 - a few days later the phone line was removed as at the time the Sky system was down and the automatic dial-home's were failing, meant the box was trying 20+ times a day, Sky said told us there were problems and to un-plug for now - we never connected it back up. Never missed an update - they are done via the satellite, the EPG is kept up-to-date - that's done over the satellite, new channels are added and taken away - that's done over the satellite.

Would be silly to have a mass transmission system available to use and then slowly dial-up and cost loads of money to do so each box.

Yes, my phone lead hasn't been connected to the Sky box for about 4 years. And in that time we have changed packages etc.