THE COLD CALLING CONVICTS

Exclusive: Inmates – including fraudsters – tout insurance from prison and quiz householders on the contents of their homes

CONVICTS are being paid for ‘cold- calling’ householders from jail.

The inmates of some of the country’s toughest prisons are being trusted to harvest sensitive information – sometimes involving financial affairs. They are picking up £3.40 a day to call potential customers for insurance policies. They also carry out marketing surveys.

One of the cold- callers was a conman who ran a £5.7million telemarketing scam with thousands of victims. Antoni Muldoon, 71, who was jailed for seven years for fraud, said: ‘You try to find out as much information as you can.’

The personal details include names, ages, marital status and number of children. Householders can be asked whether they own or rent their home and whether they have life insurance.

Unaware they are talking to a

convict, they are quizzed on their home contents, shopping habits and broadband and utility suppliers.

Concerns were raised last night about the potential dangers of the scheme and the prospect of the elderly and vulnerable being coerced into buying services or policies they do not need.

‘You really could not make this up: a conman convicted of a telemarketing scam having the chance to make cold calls while in prison,’ said Tory MP Andrew Bridgen.

‘I’m all for the rehabilitation of prisoners and getting them ready for work but you would have thought fraudsters are the least suitable people for this.’

David Green, a former Home Office adviser and director of the think-tank Civitas, described the scheme as risky. ‘On the surface this does not sound like a good way of rehabilitating offenders,’ he said.

‘Everyone is in favour of putting prisoners on to the straight and narrow but there is an inherent risk in giving people personal details, including possible financial information, when they are known to be dishonest.’

A Whitehall source said: ‘It’s bad enough getting unwanted cold calls from a normal salesman but it is terrifying to think that the person on the line asking for information is a prisoner. It’s unnerving.

‘Imagine if you were a rape victim and then you get a sex offender on the line asking all about your life.’

Until recently, convicts at category B High Down prison in Surrey, who are considered too much of an escape risk to be placed in lower security jails, were helping sell life insurance to the public.

Yesterday the Ministry of Justice confirmed that inmates continue to work at ‘call centres’ set up in other prisons across England and Wales.

The centres are staffed by prisoners working for telesurvey firms, including Census Data Group. They rent rooms inside jails where prisoners have headsets and screens and are given access to customers’ names and email addresses.

Numbers are dialled off-site by the company’s computers and transferred to the prisoners if someone picks up.

Inmates follow a script and chat to the potential customer to try to persuade them to buy insurance. If the lead looks promising, the call is transferred to registered brokers outside the prison.

Muldoon, of Lowestoft in Suffolk, was released from High Down in August. He said: ‘You talk to people and try to find out if they’ve got insurance and if you can persuade them to talk to a broker.

‘Every other call you are told to get lost or to stop ringing them. But sometimes you can get them talking. You say “You might be interested in life insurance?” and they’ll say “No, I’m 65” and you say “I’m 71 and I’m still working”. Obviously, you don’t tell them where you’re calling from.’

Located in Portishead near Bristol, Census Data is the largest, UK-based consumer telesurvey company. Its website says every day its technology makes approximately 100,000 calls and its telephone advisers speak to over 5,000 consumers.

The company says it is ‘committed to reducing reoffending by providing mean- ingful work experience and education to both serving and ex-offenders alike’.

Marketing surveys using inmates at lower security jails began in 2013.

A Prison Service spokesman said: ‘ The work scheme at HMP High Down stopped running six months ago. When prisoners do work as call centre operatives, they have absolutely no access to personal or financial details and do not make sales.

‘They have no access to the internet or no means of recording any details, and are not able to make outgoing calls as they are connected to customers through an automated system. All offenders are rigorously riskassessed for suitability for the role and all calls are supervised and monitored.’

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