ICO imposes fine for nuisance calls

The ‘phone rings. Unknown number. You answer. There is a pause... 

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) recently fined a Staffordshire based company £90,000 for making 118,000 unsolicited calls between January 2017 and September 2018 to people who had registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) that they did not wish to receive them.

It is against the law to make marketing calls to numbers that have been registered with the TPS for more than 28 days, unless people have provided consent.

The ICO investigation found that Smart Home Protection Limited had a cloud-based dialler system which suppressed TPS listed numbers, but at the time the service was not enabled. The firm also purchased third party data without undertaking any sufficient due diligence, to check whether they had the consent to call people.

A spokesman for the ICO said:

[They] has been in business for many years, so they should have been fully aware of their data protection obligations. It is a company’s responsibility to check the TPS and make sure that it has valid consent to make marketing calls. If they don’t, they can expect robust enforcement.

You can register with the TPS online at: tpsonline.org.uk 

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