ICO fines Home Logic £50,000 and issues warning to companies who fail to screen numbers before making nuisance calls

“Are you getting the best rates for home energy saving solutions and products?!”

How many calls do you get with over enthusiastic salespeople asking you if you want to switch your energy provider, bring a PPI claim or even talk about a car accident you didn’t even know you’d been involved in?

After the first few calls you start to realise just how annoying they are, and then the questions begin: “How did they get my number? Why are they calling me? Where are they coming from?”

There are all sorts of ways they can get hold of your details, and there’s a very big market for the sale of information for marketing purposes. It can often be a dark web of information being passed around time and time again, and when companies fail to check whether they can call people, the ICO will end up involved.

The Telephone Preference Service

The Telephone Preference Service Limited (TPS) is in charge of ensuring that people who have opted out of unsolicited sales calls won’t be contacted for direct marketing purposes. Companies and organisations can pay TPS for a list of contact details for people who don’t mind being contacted this way. With access to this list, companies should screen them with their own lists to ensure they only call those who have not opted out.

The ICO confirms that an “organisation can make live unsolicited marketing calls, but must not call any number registered with the TPS unless the subscriber has specifically told them that they do not object to their calls.” In this case, Home Logic ended up calling a number of individual subscribers who were registered with the TPS and didn’t want to be contacted for direct marketing purposes.

Once again – a third party provider involved

Home Logic used a third party provider to obtain a list of numbers to call after receiving assurance that the list only included people who didn’t mind the calls. Unfortunately for Home Logic, this was not the case, and the contract between them and the third party stated that the purchaser (i.e. Home Logic) was responsible to ensure the data was screened.

The company tried to blame the unwanted cold calls on technical issues with their dialler system that screened the numbers. The device was reportedly out of use for a total of 90 days between April 2015 and March 2016, but the company continued to make calls without checking if people they were contacting had opted in or out of receiving such calls.

Hundreds of complaints

There were reportedly 136 separate complaints made to the TPS, who subsequently notified the ICO about the complaints. During their investigations, Home Logic UK admitted to making 1,475,969 calls promoting its home energy saving products and services. The ICO believes Home Logic should have known they were breaching data protection laws, especially given the wide broadcast of nuisance calls in the media and previous ICO sanctions for the same.

The ICO issued Home Logic a £50,000 fine

This case prompted the ICO to release yet another statement warning about the costly consequences of cold calling people. It advises organisations to invest in paying for access to the TPS register and screening the numbers properly to ensure they do not make unsolicited nuisance calls, and can therefore save themselves tens of thousands of pounds in fines.

Steve Eckersley, Head of Enforcement at the ICO, has seen many of these cases and remains unsympathetic to the excuses organisations put forward:

“Organisations have no excuse – they know that calling people on the TPS register is against the law and that we will come down hard on them if they don’t respect the public’s right to privacy. We continue to see companies suffering the financial and reputational consequences of being caught making nuisance calls, which could have been prevented if they had invested in a TPS licence and made proper use of it. It is baffling that some firms continue to take this business risk.”