Welsh home improvement biz fined £200,000 over campaign of 675,478 nuisance calls Home2Sense Ltd, a home improvement biz, is nursing a £200,000 financial penalty from the UK's data watchdog for making well over half a million marketing calls to people that registered to opt out of such botheration. The company, based in Lampeter, Wales, was behind 675,478 nuisance calls between June 2020 and March 2021, …
Company folding in 3, 2, 1 ... pooooff, gone.
Make the directors and senior managers personally liable with say 30 years inside if they don't pay up on time.
That serves as a good lesson for anyone else that might think it to be a good idea and it has the additional benefit of getting them off the street and unable to form a new company tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.
Actually, there seem to have been first Gazette notices for compulsory strike-off in both August and December 2021, both of which were discontinued shortly afterwards. A notice was filed yesterday reporting the termination of a director appointment back in August of last year and a filing changing the registered office address is dated today. That seems more like there's an intention to keep it going.
Which is interesting, because if this is their website (it doesn't have a company registration number or address or phone number), all that phoning around netted them only 163 "happy clients".
I'm sorry, you want jail time only if they don't pay up an insignificant fine ?
They actively called people they knew they shouldn't. They lied and passed themselves off as other companies. They are crooks and should be thrown in jail now, whether or not they pay the fine.
I am sick and tired of companies getting caught behaving like scam artists only to get a few tens of thousands in fines.
The company manager knew and, if he didn't know, he's still the company manager. He either goes to jail for condoning it, or he goes to jail for being incompetent.
CEOs in jail is the only way we are going to stop this nonsense.
If this company "doesn't know" where its list of phone numbers came from, then one can only assume they breached North Korean sanctions.
This means the individual people at the company will have the corporate veil pierced and be fined 10s of million of pounds each.
Well? go ahead...prove your data WASN'T from North Korea.......
Which is worse, when you think about it. A cold call is a pain but as Aristotle's horse said above, you can just say "fuck off" and hang up. Social media advertising is like you being in the pub looking for your friends when some spiv comes up and asks if you want to buy his tat. You tell him to fuck off, but he keeps pushing. You go to the bar staff and ask them to remove him from the premises. They say no, and in fact offer to lend the spiv a megaphone because he's paid them for a pitch. The only way you can get away from him is by leaving the pub, and then you miss meeting your friends.
At least in the pub you can take a short trip to the gents and, when said spiv follows you, you can offer to sort out his dental issues nice and quickly with the nearest wall where there's no-one around to see.
It's a bit harder to do that on social media.
The bloke at the bar is easy to deal with. You drop an arm around their shoulders all friendly like, guide them outside "so you can hear yourselves talk", then hide the body in the boot of whichever car the keys in his pocket unlocks. Sure the hike home from the quarry will result in a powerful thirst, but you were headed back to the bar for your own car so score! =-D
The ad on FB is even easier to avoid. Don't visit FB in the first place. "But I need to meet my friends there!" just means you need real friends.
*Hands you a pint*
Drink up. They'll never find that car. =-D
Bollocks. The fine amounts to around 30p per call. There was a time when that was how much calls used to cost. And there's no fine or prison time aimed directly at management, so what's to stop them simply saying "nope, this bankrupts us" and setting up shop with a different name to carry on as before?
Limited companies provide significant protection to directors - so its hard to find them unless they are guilty of major crimes. Such crimes require a court case rather than an investigation by a watchdog (for good reason) - and our jails are full of people convicted of more serious crimes, I don't think jail time is warranted.
Declaring themselves bankrupt prevents them from setting themselves up as company directors again until a court lifts the bankruptcy order, so preventing them starting a new company is already built in to this penalty.
I get that nuisance calls are annoying, but the punishment should carry some perspective and be relevant to what they did (which it mostly is) - filling up jails with people convicted of minor crimes means people convicted of more significant crimes get tags because there is no room in jail.
It looks like it was written by one of the prison guards from Idiocracy. It's full of spelling, grammar and punctuation mistakes - the headline on one page is "Quality & Efficience". Particularly concerning is their "Spay Foam Insulation" service, ouch! It doesn't mention if they perform it on the customer or their pets, but either way, I think it's best left to a doctor or veterinarian.
Not only are they shithouses, they're complete thickos too. Scum of the earth.
They obviously arent bothered by the fine, as I have been getting 3 calls a day from them for the last few weeks.
I cant block them, as they are using a range of numbers, but all with the same robo-message.
As per the story, they are asking for a guy who died over 10 years ago, and have been told REPEATEDLY has been dead for over 10 years.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
