Claims assistance firm fined for cold-calling people who put themselves on opt-out list Britain's data privacy watchdog has slapped a fine of £90k ($120k) on a business that targeted people with intrusive marketing phone calls, despite them being registered with the official "Do Not Call" opt-out service. AFK Letters Co Ltd (AFK) made more than 95,000 unsolicited marketing calls to Brits who had signed up with …
The standard process for scammers and scummy people
Set up company
Ignore the law
Get caught
Get massive fine
Wind up company and file for bankruptcy
Can't pay fine
Set up new company
Ignore the law
Get caught
you see where this is going... don't you?
What should now happen is this:
Get list of directors
Put directors on watch list
Put any companies they get involved in on watch list
Monitor those companies for any repeats of the above infractions
Start prosecuting the directors if such infractions are found again.
"Yeah but then the real directors will just hire 'front men' for the listing in Companies House, do the same things, and dump them when they get too difficult to work with."
If the authorities can be bothered to enforce, acting as "shadow director" during a period of disqualification is a breach of the original disqualification order. Simply not being named as a director doesn't protect them:
https://www.businessrescueexpert.co.uk/uncovering-shadow-directors/
https://www.gov.uk/report-a-disqualified-director
Good luck getting it.
There need to be criminal sanctions against the individual directors, not just the companies. One of the directors of AFK Letters Co Ltd is listed as Konstantin Nemchukov. He is listed as having 463 'appointments', meaning directorships or equivalent, at Companies House. A quick perusal shows nearly all, if not all of these, are marked as 'dissolved'. But Konstantin is not bone idle. He has one active appointment.
I imagine these companies are not much different to how the so-called American candy shops operate. I was curious how these seem to mushroom up around the West End, so I did a bit of digging. Somebody will form a company, and open up a shop. The landlord is paid so he's happy. But the business rates are billed to the newly-formed company. They trade for a while, then that company disappears into the ether. The business rates debt dies with that company. Rinse and repeat. It is not a matter of not being able to meet their obligations. It is how they operate.
Britain has always been soft on corporate crime.
"The company's line of work is crafting official letters to help consumers claim refunds and/or compensation from firms they may have had unsatisfactory dealings with"
They missed off the for a fee bit. These companies only work for money, they are not the UK's admirable Citizens' Advice Bureau, which does help people for free.
For example, I have no doubt that AFK would have 'helped' me craft a letter to the company that provided a plumber who bodged a job with sticky tape (not gaffer tape for those who believe it can solve all problems). However, as the 'job' was done over a year ago and is now outside their guarantee period, and I cannot prove the 'plumber' just used sticky tape to 'repair' a part the costs less than £1 to replace, according to Citizens' Advice, I am unlikely to win in a court case. Somehow I expect that, for a fee, AFK would have offered to 'help' me. (But I don't know so so don't take my word for it.). Moral of my story, when you get a work person in to repair something, watch them carefully, and make sure they show you what has gone wrong, what they re doing to fix it, and photograph all parts they either remove or replace.
When I look around at the utterly abysmal standard of written English that is exhibited by an ever increasing proportion of the population, I would say that a genuine company offering a letter writing service is likely to achieve a much better chance of success in making a complaint/claim than leaving the individual to compose something that is largely illiterate and may not even be readable, much less comprehensible to the reciever.
If you want some examples, I would suggest a visit to the ebay.uk discussion boards where a good many posters can't even distinguish between the meanings of the terms 'buyer' and 'seller', let alone put together a coherent sentence.
<......."AFK made calls to those registered with the Telephone Preference Service....."......>
I am always puzzled by people who are surprised when unethical and untrustworthy organisations ring them up despite them being TPS registered.
The Telephone Preference Service only works regarding reputable companies who subscribe the the TPS database and screen the lists of numbers that they plan to call and strike out the numbers that appear in the TPS database before they start ringing.
Unethical, untrustworthy, disreputable and criminal organisations don't subscribe to the TPS, so won't have access to the database and will ring regardless. If you are TPS registered and recieve a cold call from any company or organisation that is offering a service/product for a fee, you immediately know it is a scam of some kind.
Some people seem to be incapable of understanding this, and seem to suffer under the misconception that registering with the TPS will stop all unwanted calls when if fact it doesn't and has never pretended to do so. It will only stop calls from trustworthy callers.
My number is TPS registered and I get very, very few unwanted calls.
However, I am careful about where and to whom I give my telephone number, and I am very much of the opinion that many of those who recieve a large number of unwanted calls are getting them because they have sprayed their number all over the internet (online shop etc which all seem to require you to divulge your number, despite the product or service that they offer and the method of delivery having no practical need for it). The number then gets sold on multiple times and figures on the much traded lists of telephone numbers that the cold callers use to make contact.
With regard to the claim that TPS registered numbers appear to recieve more nuisance calls than non-registered numbers - I very much doubt that being registered with TPS actually has any bearing on that at all.
Good luck if your surgery or hospital tries to call you about an imminent appointment or operation, or to tell you that a recent blood test or scan has revealed a cause for concern.
Don't even think of suggesting they use Royal Mail. On 22 April I received 11 items most of which dated back to 3 April or 8 April. Royal Mail is so broken that an NHS stamp was recently been introduced with a special barcode so that there my be a slim chance of it getting through in time.
We're becoming a fourth world country.
Here in the US, it's been repeatedly proven that the National Do-Not-Call Registry (our equivalent of the TPS) is often used as a list of confirmed live numbers for telemarketers to prioritize calling, with zero consequences since the law doesn't actually have any enforcement built in.
With texting scams, they just iterate through all possible numbers in a specified range (wardialing) and send to all, which apparently "exempts" them from DNC applicability; me and my parents have adjacent cell numbers, so we'll often get the exact same scam texts within a minute of each other...
Strange. I've been using them for several years now and never get anything other than the reminders that I created. I'd also know if they were a source of spam because I've been using a DEA system for nearly twenty years so every received email tells me who should be responsible for that email and because I run my own mail server I can check the RCPT TO command rather than relying on the untrustworthy email headers.
The fine is a quid per call, but the success rate of cold calls is pretty damned low, so the number don't necessarily add up to the "profit after fine" that it may seem to at first glance. And anyway, as per the articles and comments above, they will be gone by now and the fine will never be collected,
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