ITV braced for record £2.8 million fine over GMTV premium-rate phone-in scandal

TV watchdog Ofcom is likely to impose the maximum financial penalty on the broadcaster, taking "up to five per cent of qualifying revenue" from its coffers as punishment for fleecing viewers, amid claims it ripped off its audience to the tune of up £40million over four years.

This would smash the previous record fine, beating the £2m sanction that Carlton TV show The Connection was dealt after it faked scenes.

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The news comes as ITV yesterday announced it was scrapping its premium rate late night quiz strand ITV Play, after revenues nose-dived amid repeated revelations of phone-in rip-offs across the TV industry.

The fine for GMTV would mark a new phase in Ofcom's attempts to clean up the TV industry having already issued the BBC with a £50,000 fine for getting a child to pose as a fake competition winner on Blue Peter and Channel 5 being dealt a £30,000 for duping viewers on quiz Brainteaser.

Insiders have suggested that Ofcom has told ITV the details of the fine it is lining up for GMTV's repeated transgressions, which has seen the breakfast broadcaster's managing director Paul Corley resign over the scandal.

The broadcaster will be able to appeal against any fine.

GMTV was estimated to have ripped off £45,000 a day from viewers by letting them enter competitions they had no chance of winning.

The broadcaster's own internal investigation revealed that winners were regularly chosen before phone-lines had closed over a number of years.

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They were charged up to £1.80 a time to enter, but were throwing their money away as winners had been selected.

A Deloitte probe into the scandal claimed that the main period when the cons happened was between June 2005 and March 2007, although it said some calls which had no chance of winning went back to 2003.

It has denied that the figures is as high as £10 million a year over four years, as was claimed by a Panorama investigation.

GMTV suspended the phone-ins in April after the revelations that viewers were being conned.

As a result of the findings GMTV announced a series of measures aimed at winning back trust including 250 free prize draws, each with a £10,000 prize, refunds for viewers and a £250,000 donation to children's charity Childline.

But the broadcaster, unlike Channel 4, has refused to confirm whether all unclaimed refunds will also be handed to charity.

The size of the fine is likely to be so high as the GMTV phone-in con happened on a daily basis for a number of years unlike the Blue Peter and Brain Teaser cases.

Yesterday ITV, which owns 75 per cent of GMTV, with Disney owning the rest, admitted its late night gaming strand ITV Play would be coming to an end as it had suffered from the negative publicity surrounding "compliance problems across the sector".

The ITV Play participation TV channel, which was launched in April last year, and was originally expected to make £20 million in its first 12 months, was already canned earlier in the year. But it had continued to run programming on ITV1 and ITV2 late at night.

The commercial broadcaster set up ITV Play, which featured studio games, call games and puzzles, some of them hosted by ex-Big Brother star Brian Dowling, as a way of finding revenues outside its main TV network.

Some of ITV Play's quizzes have been criticised for their obscure solutions.

One quiz, rebuked by broadcasting watchdog Ofcom, asked viewers to name 12 things that might be found in a woman's handbag.

The correct answers included a "balaclava" and "Rawlplugs".

One maths question on the late-night Make Your Play show proved so difficult that even an Oxford maths professor was unable to solve it.

ITV said: "ITV Play's Call TV programming will be phased out by the end of this year as negative publicity following compliance problems across the sector has seen call volumes drop to uneconomic levels."

Ofcom and GMTV refused to comment on the size of the fine.