Autoriteit Consument & Markt ACM) has subjected all 1,657 active 0906 telephone numbers to a check in the past six months. These include numbers where it is not immediately clear to the caller that it is a paid number.
The regulator had already disabled 163 of them since the tightened rules for these numbers. Another 250 will be added in the coming weeks.
Stricter rules for 0906 numbers went into effect at the end of last year. "With the adjusted rules, we can tackle deception via call forwarding services much better," said ACM board member Manon Leijten. "This prevents a lot of annoyance and unnecessarily high call charges for consumers and companies." In the coming period, the regulator will focus on information numbers starting with 18. Through these phone numbers, callers can, among other things, request phone numbers or the address of a company.
Those who previously wanted to call a toll-free number, for example from the Tax Phone, could be misled on the Internet. There, advertisements of paid call forwarding services were displayed. Callers were often unaware that they were connected through a paid call forwarding service, when they could also have called that service free of charge.
