The card firm was censured for errors committed at its call centres.
Barclaycard has been fined by Ofcom for persistently bothering householders with "silent calls".
The credit card firm was censured and fined £50,000 by the regulator for the calls - which generally occur due to automatic dialling systems at call centres. When there are not enough operators on the line to cover all the calls being placed through these systems, silent calls are the result.
In a bid to tackle the problem, Ofcom introduced a new guideline for silent calls - that they must not amount to over three percent of calls placed by the centre each day - and began a round of investigations of UK organisations. Abbey, Space Kitchens, Carphone Warehouse and others have all been found in breach of this limit and fined previously by the watchdog.
Ofcom did not reveal how many silent calls Barclaycard made over the period under investigation - from October 2006 to May 2007 - but did say that it was higher than those it fined Abbey for recently. The rival credit card provider had been found by the watchdog to have made 16,000 silent calls during the investigation.
Chief executive of the watchdog Ed Richards commented: "Taken as a whole this is the most serious case of persistent misuse by making silent and abandoned calls that Ofcom has ever investigated. Had we not been limited by the statutory maximum, we would have imposed a larger financial penalty to reflect this misuse."
Responding, an Abbey spokesperson said: "We recognise that all calls, irrespective of the purpose, should be made in the right way and we accept that our processes, in place at the time of the review by Ofcom, were inadequate.
"We have made robust and lasting changes to our processes, operations and reporting to ensure that we continue to be compliant and to provide the highest levels of service to all our customers."
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