A premium rate phone line, which frightened pensioners into making expensive calls, has been suspended following an investigation by the Birmingham Evening Mail.

Both West Midlands Police and Birmingham Trading Standards Department have launched probes into the computer support firm running the phone line.

And the Independent Committee for the Supervision of Standards of Telephone Information Services, which regulates premium rate telephone lines, has forced the firm to suspend the line after being contacted by the Evening Mail and receiving a complaint from a member of the public.

Scores of people in Hodge Hill in Birmingham received letters from the company ordering them to pay £59 for a home support package - even though many of them don't have computers.

The letters, which were personally addressed and gave individual account and reference numbers, urged householders, many of whom were elderly, to ring the company immediately and claimed their credit rating could be at risk if they didn't pay.

The letter also said they could write, but many people were so worried they rang the telephone number - a premium rate line costing £1.50 a minute.

One reader who contacted the Evening Mail said she had spent two minutes waiting to speak to someone before being put through to an answer machine, and later discovered that her neighbours had received identical letters.

The paper then learned of dozens of other complaints from nearby areas and tried to trace the company, but was told the Birmingham PO Box address it gave in its letters doesn't exist.

It also rang one of the numbers given in the letter and got through the account manager, who denied people were being misled but admitted he had received complaints.

And he promised that where people had been sent a letter by mistake and rung the premium rate line they would get a refund.

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