Nuisance caller fined a quarter of a million pounds by the ICO A claims spam company from Blackburn has been fined £250,000 by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) after making over 17.5 million nuisance calls. Check Point Claims had harassed people illegally with automated calls encouraging them to claim compensation for job-related hearing loss. The ICO launched its …
The Insolvency Commissioner's blog today has an interesting post on the subject:
Insolvency law – why rogue directors trying to avoid fines face a rocky ride
(some snippets)
The job of the insolvency practitioner is to review the conduct of a company’s directors before the business became insolvent. That investigation can look at the directors’ action as much as six years before the insolvency, and even further if there are criminal claims.
Following the review, the insolvency practitioner will prepare a director report which is to be filed with the Insolvency Services, and if the report demonstrates unfit conduct, the director can face serious sanctions:
...
Up to ten years imprisonment, a fine or both:
* Fraudulent trading ...
Up to 7 years imprisonment, a fine or both:
* Fraud in anticipation of winding up ...
I rarely get marketing calls on my mobile but I got one this morning - presumably: it was an 0845 number reported, I didn't answer, I put it into Google and various web sites say it's a nuisance service, usually for car accident claims.
Perhaps it was this company or a reincarnation of it making a rude gesture by spamming everyone in the country.
This is where ICO needs to grow up. Fine the owners and directors as they are the bad people not the company. I agree with KaneSama with the fine being £1 call for every scam call with the recovered assets split between UK Treasury, ICO and CitizensAdvice. This would be an incentive to collect the fines.
These popup companies needs to be brought under control.
Now... who is tackling the India scam syndicate callers...
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Limited liability is a shield for the owners. But not for the directors.
Other comments about slow investigations are spot on. There need to be statutory per call damages, right of private action in small claims & holding both the callers and those who hire them jointly and severally liable.
Pie in the sky? Not at all. That's exactly the remedies in the usa's TCPA and whilst the USA still has trouble with illegal calls, they're insignificant compared to the levels of spam calls and faxes before the act was passed in 1994.
Just out of curiousity, I've done a bit of basic digging on this one. The director for the last two years until the time of liquidation was "Hassim Iqbal" - the company went into liquidation on 15 March. A man with the same name and birthdate (born March 1983) and the same service address is a director of three companies, none of which are in liquidation:
Pension shield has a website. A quick google shows that they have done this sort of thing before, and presumably will continue to do so.
HS2 Medicals is wholly owned by Hayes Medicals, a medical claims company, who are at the same address as Pension Shield. They're on Linked In, and apparently work "closely with solicitors" on medical injury claims. Hayes Medicals was bought in 2012 by Aviya Group. I imagine a suitably motivated journalist would be able to ask some interesting questions of one of the Solicitors they work with about their connection.
Aviya Group have Mr Iqbal as a director, but not a shareholder. However they're clearly in the same line of business: here is a job advert posted by them for a familiar sounding role.
What a grubby little nest of vipers.
I note they are all Ltd companies, i.e. 'a private company whose owners are legally responsible for its debts only to the extent of the amount of capital they invested.'.
So as an individual, Mr Iqbal is presumably not liable to pay this fine.
Perhaps certain types of business shouldn't be allowed to register as a Limited company?
"Perhaps certain types of business shouldn't be allowed to register as a Limited company?"
But then they'd just set up as a "limited liability partnership" - much beloved of legal and accountancy firms, so pretty sure to be safe from any new restrictions in the future ( IIRC Private Eye ran a story last year about an address in Sunderland that is home to several thousand LLPs, so they're obviously an essential part of the UK economy ).
You can be banned from being a director if the Insolvency Service deems you unfit. There's even a form for reporting such an individual.
Again, a suitably motivated journalist might get some mileage from asking the ICO if they have been arsed to make such a report. I'd be interested to hear the answer.
They can be banned, but wife/partner/in-law/off-spring/sibling/dog/cat/etc will open a rather similar sounding company the very next day with someone looking very like Mr. X now the "Office manager". Think of those BBC consumer programmes where Mr. X's company has gone insolvent owing a small fortune to customers, and the premises opened up immediately on the same site, with the same staff and the same dodgy used cars etc.
"Think of those BBC consumer programmes where Mr. X's company has gone insolvent owing a small fortune to customers, and the premises opened up immediately on the same site, with the same staff and the same dodgy used cars etc."
Interestingly, the insolvency laws have just been rejigged to try and prevent this happening. In particular they try to nail down reuse of the name, similar sounding names or giving any indication that they've taken over business from the previous company.
"So as an individual, Mr Iqbal is presumably not liable to pay this fine."
As a shareholder perhaps.
As a director, he should be fair and squarely in the firing line.
I spent the afternoon looking through the ICO blogs. They've been using DPA laws to go after these companies in addition to the call fines, but the penalties imposed in court are derisory at best.
Well spotted, and thank you for the additional info/links.
I did the same initial Companies House search (where else is Hassim Iqbal director besides Check Point Claims Ltd), but didn't take it any further when Hassim Iqbal initially showed up as having no other/previous directorships at Companies House.
The PensionShield website even has a contact address on it. It's an address in a multitenanted shared office block. Two different suites within it contain the trading address and the registered office of Pension Shield. If anybody is familiar with 33 King Street Blackburn suites 20 and 22 you might like to check if that matches the published information at Companies House and at the Pension Shield website.
Other "company check" websites have different addresses for what appears to be the same Hassim Iqbal - not just a partial match, each of director name, month of birth (March 1983), company name - but different address.
According to the statement of affairs on companies house, the company also owes £75K in VAT to HMRC, approx 8K in PAYE and various other amounts including apparently business rates - and has absolutely no assets.
It smells like there's an awful lot more to this story. The law allows directors to be held personally liable for company debts - without more details it's hard to see if those fully apply, but it would seem the small number of cases where the ICO or HMRC actually try to hold the directors personally liable is not a sufficient deterrent prevent behaviour like seen here.
I'm a bit rusty on my corporate law, but I think a director is only personally liable if they have defrauded the company or done similar un-directorial acts. Receiving an "unexpected" quarter-million pound bill would shut a lot of small companies, and they would leave a lot of debt.
Whatever assets remain, you an be sure HMRC will get first dibs on them, and they do have a right to go after assets transferred away from the company to directors, shareholders or to linked companies/individuals immediately before insolvency too.
I'm not sure how much of this process will be part of the public record.
Given the connection method used by telecoms companies, why can't we 'auto report this call' - even 'we do not have the number' ones - with a button on the handset or something? The operator would at least be able to scrape some caller info from the call set up information to accumulate as evidence.
What's quite worrying is that 6million+ connected calls only generated 200+ complaints. Surely that says it's too difficult to report them? Or is it that Mr Telecom operator takes a cut per call so it's not in their interest to provide an easy method of preventing/reporting such calls?
> What's quite worrying is that 6million+ connected calls only generated 200+ complaints. Surely that says it's too difficult to report them?
Most of these outfits are using fraudulent caller-ID, so unless you're willing to do a fair amount of legwork it's fairly difficult to identify them.
Using forged caller-ID should be a _criminal_ matter. It's too easy to forge and most telcos have no filters in place to prevent them being issued from ISDN lines (BT being one of the few exceptions)
I got a call the other day from "Direct Assistance", they had my name, phone number (obviously) address (they told me my postcode without checking) and my car details. They were claiming I had damage to my vehicle in the last 2 years and would I like to make a claim. I asked where they got my information from to which he replied we are part of the M.I.B. (not that one, the motor insurance bureau), I stated I would like to check this out and he offered to call back in 20 minutes however I explained that I had no damage and there would be no point.
Searching M.I.B. had me concerned so I rang them and they are aware of this company using their name.
Reported to the ICO along with the phone number. Will anything happen? No. However these companies are getting a little cheeky with their behaviour bordering on fraud.
Fines are a waste of time, it's about time this was turned into a criminal offence.
Interestingly I did try to work out how they had all these details and the only conclusion I can come to is that as my car insurance company don't have my new mobile they must have got it from my mobile provider (same company), I suppose every little helps.
I had a similar situation a few years ago, when I found my name and address listed in 118800 (another grubby bottom feeder, long since shut down). They'd bought my details from a middleman, Data Media And Research, a subsidiary of known all round good-guys The Daily Mail Group, who had got them from an online car insurance quote company - quotelinedirect.co.uk in this case.
Naturally they were adamant I had checked the "please email me bullshit offers" box, whereas I was sure I had not. Either way, if you've ever applied for insurance online there's a good chance that's where it came from.
A data protection letter is cheap to send and the response might make for interesting reading.
Sorry, but if ever there was a time to ditch your landline this is it.
At least mobiles have Caller-ID by default and for free, and can reject on unknown numbers with one little switch of an option, and can blacklist individual Caller-IDs from the call log menu itself and in the worst case you can install apps that will auto-check the numbers for you.
And you can report spam texts on the major networks by just texting them to the keyword "SPAM" - but I bet they lose half the information in doing so.
Why people continue to tolerate this, I don't understand. Vote with your wallet and cut your phone line if they aren't providing adequate service by blocking these morons.
6m calls, 1,2m connected and how many leads did they get from that, and how many claims made from that? I'm guessing the fine is not the only reason they've gone bankrupt. Because even if it's a fraction of one percent it's still not really worth doing compared to just going to insurers and buying lists of people who DID opt in.
That's why you block unknown numbers - which costs to do on landline, and doesn't on mobile (because it's the MOBILE that's deciding!).
And you can leave your phone at home, you know. Or mute it. Or even program it so that it only alerts between certain hours. Welcome to the 21st Century...
This is pretty much legit compared with some of these scams. How some much more dodgy operators work:
Sign up for a SIP trunk with little or no (preferably no) payment up front.
Sign up for a non-geographic number with a different provider, the sort where the recipient gets a cut of the call charges.
Using PC Or even a hosted virtual machine start pumping out spam calls as fast as the SIP trunk will let you with a callback to the NGN.
Incoming calls to the NGN are rooted to a simple recorded message, maybe even an IVR to harvest callers' personal details.
Reap the income from the NGN.
Ignore bills for the SIP trunk until the provider cuts you off.
Sign up for a new SIP trunk and new NGN if necessary.
Repeat until the authorities or debt collectors show an interest.
Disappear.
Start again under a new name.
Repeat until rich or arrested.
Mostly rich.
The thing with these scams is they can be set up from abroad with fake credentials, all you need is a bank account for the income to flow into, which can be erupted and closed as required. Some of these crooks set up for only a matter of days or even hours before they disappear.
OK, but surely this business model falls apart if there's a month or two's delay on the payments from the supplier of the revenue sharing non geographic number (NGN) to the operator of the non geographic number? As long as the payments turn up in due course, any business that can't survive without a delay of a month or so on its payments isn't viable anyway?
On the other hand, during that time it becomes entirely obvious that the spammer is using the NGN for purposes outwith those legitimately allowed by the contract with the provider of the NGN, therefore the contract is null and void therefore no money is due.to the spammer?
I thought that kind of approach was supposed to be implemented years ago? Am I misremembering?
Firstly there isn't necessarily a long delay in receiving payments from NGNs depending on the proveider. Secondly a canny organisation wouldn't necessarily use the same entity to acquire the trunk, the NGN and the VMs hosting the dialler and IVR. As such the link between the spam calls and the calls and the NGN isn't necessarily made in time. Indeed canny operators will cut and run on the SIP trunk and VMs long before the first bill arrives.
" there isn't necessarily a long delay in receiving payments from NGNs "
Indeed - that's the point (though I didn't make it very clear).
If the rules change such that a long delay in payments is mandatory until such time as a business has some track record, then the business model falls apart, because the bills come in before the revenue comes in, regardless of whether the facilities are all from the same outfit or not.
... rather than await hundreds of complaints. Hit them with a £1k fine for the first genuine complaint and for every subsequent complaint increase the rate per instance by 10%. They might even choose to pay up and clean up their act - a win for ICO and a win for the scammed general public.
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