A record fine of £350,000 has been given to a company responsible for 46 million cold calls.
This is the largest penalty issued to date by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
Prodial Ltd was a PPI “lead generation’ company behind millions of automated calls which then played recorded messages relating to the claim process.
Pordial Ltd operated out of a residential property, hiding its true identity, making it harder for the consumer to report the calls, the company still had more than 1,000 complaints made about it to the ICO.
The timeshare industry is plagued with cold callers, so one knows exactly how intrusive these calls are. People were left feeling helpless to report Prodial or stop the calls from constant reoccurrence, day and night.
Nowadays it is common place for companies like Prodial Ltdto use internet phone lines with any number they purchase to cheaply make huge numbers of cold marketing calls. The data protection act controls how your personal data should be used and states that that only “opted-in” data should be used make contact.
This is not the case in some companies and Prodial is just one example that had no relevant consent to be making these unsolicited calls and an investigation showed that the data had been purchased and any interested “leads” generated from these calls was then subsequently sold on to claims-management companies.
The investigation indicated that despite a marketing campaign, in a booming sector, which could have produced a turnover of nearly £1 million, one of the company directors had put Prodial into voluntary liquidation. This in itself is a questionable situation as it means that the fine will probably not be paid. The ICO’s enforcement team is now having to work with liquidators to recover what part of the fine they can obtain. Going forward the directors and staff will no doubt go on to start-up the same nuisance calls under another trading name, the only positive is that these people have now been marked so future activity will be monitored.
Information Commissioner Christopher Graham said:
“This is one of the worst cases of cold calling we have ever come across. The volume of calls made in just a few months was staggering.”
Within the timeshare industry there are many “Cold Caller” lists which are publicised on a monthly basis, so if you get a call that you don’t believe you have requested or “opted-in” to receive, you should check against these lists to see if they are a known nuisance caller. You can see the latest publicised list from Mindtimeshare here.
Richard Lloyd, Executive Director of Which? Commented on this latest Prodial Ltd fine by saying:
“Millions of people are bombarded with nuisance calls, so it’s good to see the ICO issuing ever larger fines to tackle this everyday menace. We now need to see the government introduce tougher penalties for senior executives of companies making unlawful calls, including ensuring that board directors are held personally accountable.”
For more information regarding this article or assistance in any other timeshare related issues please contact the TCA on 01908 881058 or email: info@TimeshareConsumerAssociation.org.uk