I stopped "working" for this company six months ago. I say working, but I actually mean contracting as you're working on a strictly self employed basis.
£15 an hour sounds quite good when you first hear it, but you will quickly see that the majority of bookings passed on to you by PC Call Out are easily completed in under an hour (removing spyware and other easy tasks). Their hourly charge was a ridiculous £58, which I found difficult to justify considering the nature of the jobs.
The company must be recruiting engineers on a continous basis, so much so that I was emailed the "Payment Procedures" and "Information for new engineers" almost weekly. PC Call Out also encouraged dragging out bookings as long as possible, encouring "engineers" (as they like to call us) to install trial versions of software in order to achieve this. The usual customers seemed to be elderly and with little or no experience of computers.
Easy money you might think, but I quickly found that it was difficult to justify doing it - I was an evening engineer and despite telling them early on that I would only be prepared to do jobs in my local town (afterall, that's where the job was advertised on the JCP website) I was routinely allocated jobs 30-40 miles away, which I would then have to waste an evening (1 hours driving there, 1 hour at the booking, 1 hour driving back) all for the sake of earning £15 (which I would then have to pay tax on) plus a pitiful 15p per mile (barely covering fuel costs).
Although I eventually (3 weeks in) recieved payment, I found the whole thing to be quite dodgy. As the guy above says, the company is not even in the UK, and there reputable sounding Regent Street address is nothing more than a dodgy PO Box. (search for the address on google if you don't believe me). If you ever need to contact someone, you are given a voicemail number only and someone calls you back - It's not possible to ring them direct.
All in all it seems like quite a lucrative business for them - They probably don't have any overheads (office space, etc) and are raking in 40 pound an hour just for taking a phone call from a customer and allocating the job to an "engineer", who does the ringing, travelling, and work for the princely sum of £15 an hour. Easy money for them indeed.
One thing, they were always banging on about "dishonest" engineers and I can see why. It would have been easy to obtain a booking from PC Call Out, then ring them and tell them the customer had decided to cancel their booking. I knew of an engineer who's only reason for working for them was because of this - He'd get the customer's details, contact them direct, get them to cancel the booking, then go and visit them privately. Customers would usually agree to this as they would be charged a lot less, and the engineer in question could charge say £30, in which case they'd both come out better off.
PC Call Out however wised up to this and tried to ban the contacting of customers. This proved quite ridiculous, as you'd often end up arriving at the booking with no prior knowledge of what the problem was
I couldn't do that.