In an interesting regulatory action by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at the end of last year, pay day loans company First Financial was fined £175,000 for sending millions of unlawful spam texts.
This breached the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR), which govern electronic marketing, and require organisations to obtain an individual’s consent before sending marketing messages by text. In this case, says the ICO, 4,031 complaints were made against messages sent from numbers which the ICO found to belong to First Financial.
The spam texts were sent using un-registered SIM cards, which, according to the ICO, is a common method used to avoid detection. However the content of the message was similar on each occasion and referred recipients to a website belonging to firstpaydayloanuk.co.uk, which is a trading name used by First Financial.
The imposition of the fine follows the prosecution of the company’s former sole director, Hamed Shabani, in October 2013. Mr Shabani was found to have breached the requirements of the Data Protection Act in failing to notify the ICO that First Financial was processing personal information. He was fined £1,180.66.
The most recent fine also comes on top of separate regulatory action by the Advertising Standards Authority.
The ICO has helpfully published detailed guidance for direct marketers explaining their legal requirements under the Data Protection Act and Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations. The guidance covers the circumstances in which organisations are able to carry out marketing over the phone, by text, by email, by post or by fax.
Contact Lewis Nedas’ Criminal Lawyers in London
If you or your organisation are being investigated by the ICO and you require specialist legal advice, please contact our solicitors Jeffrey Lewis or Siobhain Egan on 020 7387 2032 or complete our online enquiry form here.
This blog post is intended as a news item only - no connection between Lewis Nedas and the parties concerned is intended or implied.
