4 companies fined £600,000 by the ICO over spam and nuisance marketing

Firms behind a massive 44 million spam emails, 15 million nuisance calls and millions of spam texts have been fined by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

The four companies at the centre of this mass tirade of nuisance marketing have been hit with fines totalling £600,000 by the UK’s data watchdog. The offending companies failed to have the proper agreement of their targets prior to contacting them, which is what landed them in trouble for their actions.

The 4 companies hammered by the ICO are as follows:

• Barrington Claims Limited: fined £250,000 for over 15 million automated marketing calls about the dreaded PPI between February 2016 and May 2016
• Newday Limited: fined £230,000 for over 44.7 million spam emails promoting financial products from April 2015 to January 2017
• Goody Market UK Limited: fined £40,000 for 111,367 spam texts using people’s information sourced from another firm and purchased on behalf of them by a data broker
• TFLI Limited: fined £80,000 for over 1.19 million spam texts using personal information sourced by other companies

There were hundreds of complaints from the public that prompted the ICO to investigate the activity of the four offending organisations. People stated that the frequency and persistence of the marketing calls were particularly concerning, as well as the fact that the recipients had not given specific consent to receive such nuisance calls, texts and emails.

With the new laws coming into force at the end of May that could see offending firms fined millions of pounds for breaching data protection rules and regulations, companies who fail to uphold the rights of the people they hound may find themselves in far deeper waters in the future for similar offences.

There is simply no excuse when it comes to permission and marketing.

If a company doesn’t have proper consent and permission, they risk falling foul of the law and face crippling fines from the ICO.