Until the poor sods that got rung up get some money
This is just an industry reach-round ....
A firm that sells nuisance call-blocking systems is itself nursing a £170,000 fine from the UK's data watchdog, ironically for cold calling almost 200,000 people registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS). Brighton-based Yes Consumer Solutions Ltd (YCSL) failed to check its marketing list against the TPS, and as …
I'm not sure which part of this is the most bizarre:
- A supplier of nuisance call-blocking systems doesn't understand that a cold call made without the recipient's explicit consent is a nuisance call.
- The sole director of the company bought the contact list from a liquidated marketing company they used to be the sole director of.
In Luxembourg, if you are the general manager of a company that goes insolvent, you are forbidden from ever being a general manager in any Luxembourg-based company again.
Generally there's a limited amount of siblings and cousins an incompetent idiot can call on (and who will agree to take the fall), so I rather like that law.
TPS (run by marketing wankers)
is fucking pointless.
They want so many details about the company that phoned you, which in most cases is impossible to get from the twats phoning you.
so your complaint is immediately invalid, due to not being able to get the directors shoe sizes.
"I don't know, they will have a very low conversion rate for blind calls and a low profit per call."
Fuck the conversion rate, the fuckers need to pay for all the fucking harrasment they do.
We are not talking about fining just for a cut of the fucking profits, it needs to fucking hurt.
i.e 100 times the fucking profit.
(strange you are worried about their profit, you a director of it?)
The UK needs to use the USA's Telephone COnsumer Protection Act as a template
for people called: $500 _PER CALL_ statutory damages - collectable against both the marketer AND the company that hired them (tripled for wilful violations such as breaching TPS)
On top of that the FCC can impose fines of $11,000 per call (again, tripled for wilful violations)
The director of the FCC was quite open that this was intended to cause offenders to go out of business via the death of a million paper cuts
These types of operations are outright frauds and should be dealt with as such. The damage they cause to their elderly victims is immesurable (mentally, not just financially). These operations (which have been going for years) slip between the gaps because they're not considered big enough for police to deal with, and Trading Standards don't have the resources to catch them. Well done to the ICO for doing something, but it's just a slap on the wrists. Until they are dealt with properly