Spam texters fined £30K

Manchester firm Carfinance247 has been fined £30K over a spam text campaign. The car finance brokerage firm’s noxious text messaging tactics generated 912 complaints to the ICO, the UK’s data privacy watchdog. The firm’s four-month marketing campaign involved the distribution of 65,000 messages to people who hadn’t first …

[Anonymous Coward]

Still paltry fines

1) Spam text messaging is easy and cheap

2) Surprisingly, text message marketing can be very effective

3) The fines are insignificant

If I were the people behind this I'd be looking to see what my net return on campaign costs were, including the fine. And I suspect they'll conclude its still cheaper and more effective to use spam texts than any other marketing channel. If the penalties don't escalate and there's no personal sanctions against bosses, why would they stop?

Whilst they might be wary of doing it too directly next time, I'm sure there's dodges using offshore companies to do it on your behalf.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Still paltry fines

There's on-shore companies that do it too. It's pretty much untraceable if you use 3g dongles and pre-pay sim cards. You can get them to send one message per second per dongle, you can run about 50 dongles per area before they start disconnecting from the network.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Still paltry fines

There's on-shore companies that do it too.

That's what Carfinance247 were doing, but they still got nailed. The SMS spammer appears to have covered themselves by the agreements they had with the company, with Carfinance247 making out that they had the permission and the SMS sender saying "sure, we believe you".

Even if they managed technical anonymity, I don't think that would protect the beneficiary company, because the ICO investigation would find that they'd tried to hide it, and that would be taken into account.

Interestingly the ICO report says that they had almost a thousand complaints via the SMS spam reporting. If that's relevant to the 65k spam texts, then the spam reporting service (forwarding to 7726 but adding the sending number) works, and the ratio of complaints is much higher than say email spam.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whilst they might be wary of doing it too directly next time

Hence the claim "it wasn't us, someone else sent them" being rejected.

My question would be "So, why did X send all these messages at their own cost when you would benefit"?

[Sebastian A]

Re: Whilst they might be wary of doing it too directly next time

"To make us look bad to potential customers and get investigated up the wazoo by you guys." maybe?

[adam payne]

£30k fine but how much money did they make from the campaign?

[Mage]

Only 50p per message cost!

Crazy low fine. 50p per violation!

Fine them £100 per violation! That would be still only £6M, though.

[MrDamage]

Re: Only 50p per message cost!

Then they should start at 50p for the first spam message, £1 for the second, £2 for the third, and double exponentially for each violation.

[Anonymous Coward]

and double exponentially for each violation

Nice idea, but the fine would very quickly be greater than global GDP. Still, they could then have assets seized to "cover" the short fall.

[MiguelC]

And will the fine be paid?

Let me guess, "Carfinance247" is no more and "Carfinance248" just started doing business...