What a difference a year makes: ICO tele-spam fines break £2m barrier The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has issued £2m in fines since a change in the law allowing it to crack down on nuisance marketing, an increase of more than 565 per cent on the preceding 12 months. As the law stands, companies intending to make marketing phone calls without prior permission must first check the …
But just how much of the fines has actually been collected?
We did this a while back. The answer is about 70%. Problem is that the people who do pay up are usually those who didn't intend to breach the law, and those who intentionally flout the law are the fly-by-nights who the ICO is unsuccessful in collecting from.
Closing down a company to avoid a debt or fine would count as fraud. It isn't the ICO's skill set or duty to chase non-payers, but what they should do, but apparently don't is report the non-paying "shut-downs" to the Insolvency Service and the police, as it is their job to address these situations.
It's still too little, too late. The government has no will to tackle this massive problem because it's so profitable for their chums to sell expensive call blocking telephones and expensive network services instead.
It will be solved only by JAILING the CEOs of companies buying sales leads from third parties (often overseas) who call TPS numbers. Telephone directories already have fake 'honeypot' numbers to catch those who make pirate copies of the contents, so they should have similar TPS-listed fake numbers that route directly to the Information Commissioner. Make a sales call to one of those - and go straight to jail !
Similarly, phone companies should be obliged to provide network services such as Caller Display, Anonymous Call Rejection, Choose to Refuse and Automatic Call Trace (1477) free of charge to allow nuisance calls to be blocked and enforcement action taken. The telcos are effectively blackmailing subscribers into paying for these network services or be bombarded by nuisance calls around the clock.
Yes. The companies who's ass dangles over our side of the fence needs kicking until they get the message; "connecting scam callers to our lines is not an acceptable revenue stream".
Let's hope the lovely people at Westminster have no investments in your telco, as that would obviously be a huge obstacle in getting consumer protection.
Companies Fined by the ICO and current company status.
20k - ADVICE DIRECT LIMITED - Annual return overdue
180k - F.E.P. HEATCARE LIMITED - Still Trading
300k - Prodial Ltd - Liquidation.
70k - Direct Security Marketing Ltd - Annual return overdue
80k - MyIML - Active proposal to strike off
80k - Telecom Protection Service Ltd - Active proposal to strike off - Accounts overdue - Annual return overdue
90k - Nuisance Call Blocker Ltd - Annual return overdue
80k - UKMS Money Solutions Ltd - Still Trading
80k - Oxygen Ltd - Active proposal to strike off
200k - Help Direct UK Ltd - Liquidation
75k - Cold Call Elimination Ltd - Active proposal to strike off - Accounts overdue - Annual return overdue
64k - Direct Assist Ltd - Liquidation
The not complete list is chronological with the most recent at the top. The information is freely available on both the ICO and companies house websites.
It's clear that these fines do not work. Maybe el reg could fire off a FOI for actual fines collected?
How do you fix it?
A solution maybe where the telecom provider has some degree of responsibility when allowing or finding a customer is dialling or sending sms to large volumes of numbers.
They could make it mandatory for all companies that perform these activities to register with the ICO with a threat of a fine to the owner of the company if they don't and as part of that registration the owner undertakes to adhere to the ICO rules and is personally liable should they wilfully brake those rules.
Just a couple of ideas.
"How do you fix it?"
A limited liabiilty company limits the SHAREHOLDER liabilities, not the directors.
Acting illegally can and should put the directors on the hook, personally, along with the staff.
No, I have absolutely no sympathy for anyone working in an illegal call centre. They may be ignorant that it's illegal on the day they start but they'll be well aware of the fact by the end of the day. Twonks waffling on about "needing to earn an income" are on par with those who defend burglars on the basis that they need the income.
F E Park Heatcare not only still trading, still cold calling TPS registered phones. Method used, normally within 15 minutes or so: phone call from international number (automatically blocked), phone call from unknown number (automatically blocked), phone call from local number (changes each time and cannot be guaranteed to be blocked) leaving message on answer machine.
I have a TrueCall gadget on my phone, and I can access the details and have the records since installation of all calls. When first installed, there were on average 10 calls a day (maximum over 30), nowadays, less than 5 a week usually.
Here's a suggestion which may help although I don't claim it is the silver bullet.
Limit the number of call origination attempts from any particular line on a per minute, per hour and per day basis. This is a limit below the inherent limit imposed by the capacity of the network.
I have a paid for IMAP/Webmail service as I'd rather pay than use the usual personal info snooping suspects. Despite being paid for (they have no free option, only a short free trial with much lower limits) they still impose limits on the number of emails sent to prevent people sending bulk/junk emails. In normal use (even business) you shouldn't hit the limits unless you're definitely up to no good.
All outgoing calls placed (even invalid numbers, engaged and voice mail etc) count against the attempt limits to prevent randomly calling numbers to build a list of valid numbers.
There is a chance you may hit the call limits if you're trying to phone up for e.g. high demand concert tickets but I suspect the limit can be set to a level that curbs the spammers but also doesn't impinge on 99.9% of subscribers.
Once someone hits one of the call origination limits (per minute/hour/day) the network locks the line into incoming calls and 999 only for 24 hours after the attempt that hit the limit. Since this would hit telco revenues it would require legislation. Some companies may get around the limits by installing extra lines to keep their calling within the limits. That's fine since their costs would escalate massively threatening the viability of their business model. Alternatively allow higher limits per line only if the company pays 100x across ALL their lines.
Icon: Robocaller not only wants your clothes, boots, and bike but also wants you to press 1 if you've had an accident in the last five years.
"Unless my arithmetic fails me, less than 1p per call. Doesn't sound like much of a deterrent."
The value of the fine per call is irrelevant, what makes a fine effective is how big it is compared to how much money a company makes. Cold calling is not exactly a lucrative, high-margin business. Reports aren't entirely consistent about exactly how much Prodial made (hardly surprising since tax dodging was also an important part of their business model), but some of the numbers are given are around £70,000 per month for 4 months (so £280k total), or 40.2 million calls, with a 0.5% return rate and selling for between 50p-£1 each (so no more than £200k total).
As others have mentioned actually collecting the fine may be something of a problem, but the size doesn't seem to be an issue given that it's significantly more than the criminals likely made from the scheme in the first place.
The best way I can think of to get rid of these calls is to go after the firms who are being advertised for. If that fine is huge, it will quickly stop people employing these bastards and then the market goes away.
Remove the market and the end product goes away....
The problem with that is a company could set up advertising for its competitor in order to put them out of business. If done well it'd be hard to prove who instigated it and even then if the truth ever came to light the damage would be done.
Go after the directors of the companies providing the service, and nuke them from orbit.
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