ICO hails '£10k a day in fines' for nuisance callers

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is bigging up its record in the fight against cold call rogues pestering some of the UK’s most vulnerable people, pointing out that it has fined marketing firms the equivalent of nearly £10,000 a day so far this year.
The ICO has received more than 93,000 complaints in the first eight months of 2016 from people who have received nuisance calls and texts and has issued fines totalling £1.5m to companies behind nuisance marketing.
Those firms were responsible for more than 70 million calls and more than 500,000 spam text messages.
Fines this year include:
– A £350,000 fine for a firm responsible for over 46 million automated nuisance calls.
– A £50,000 fine for a company which sent more than 500,000 texts urging people to support its campaign to leave the EU.
– A £250,000 fine for a claims management company that made 17.5 million calls asking people if they had suffered hearing loss at work.
ICO head of enforcement Stephen Eckersley said: “Our helpline staff hear first-hand the level of distress cold calls can cause. The rules around marketing messages are there for a reason.
“We have acted on information provided by the public and specifically targeted companies that phone people in the middle of the night, ask to speak to deceased relatives or ring repeatedly after being asked to stop.
“People reporting their nuisance marketing concerns to us are vital to our work. Those reports inform our investigations and help us stop the firms bombarding the public with troublesome calls, texts and emails. We’ve already got further fines in the pipeline and with your help we can take more action.”

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TOPICS:ICO nuisance calls PECR

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