Office of Communications (Ofcom) has fined the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) a total of £400,000 for breaching its Broadcasting Code pertaining unjust conduct of viewer and listener competitions. Ofcom is the independent regulator and competition authority for the communication industries in the United Kingdom.

This happens to be the highest financial penalty that has been slapped upon the BBC by the Ofcom. The Ofcom particularly has found the BBC guilty of breaching Rule 2.11 of the Code (‘Competitions should be conducted fairly...’) for faking winners and duping its audience in certain programmes.

The Office of Communications maintains that such flouting of the Code is very serious affair. It holds that the BBC conned its viewers by creating fake winners of competitions and consciously executing competitions in an unjust manner.  

Enquiry revealed that in few cases, the production team had taken pre-mediated decisions to broadcast competitions and encourage listeners to enter in the full knowledge that the audience stood no chance of winning. It was also found that fake names of winners were announced in some BBC programmes.

The Ofcom concluded that BBC did not have full knowledge of the omissions and compliance on the part of its management and training procedures to ensure that the viewer was not fooled. It was revealed that even though the audience paid the cost of their calls to participate in the competitions, the money paid never reached the BBC.