Counting the seconds till these two outfits are liquidated.
Many of these fines are never paid.
Jail the scum.
The UK's data watchdog has slapped a £220,000 fine on two firms that collectively made hundreds of thousands of nuisance calls to flog home security services. Middlesborough-based biz ACT Response Ltd and Secure Home Systems, nestled in the West Midlands, made 580,802 calls to people who were registered with the Telephone …
Has anyone done a FoI request to check the total value of fines issues vs the amount of money actually paid?
Getting tired of the Watchdog saying "we issued fines" but nothing actually happening. If it is having no affect, time to shut the department down.
Is their actually a legitimate use for mass dialing gear other than to extract money from the most vulnerable member's of society, if not then just ban the lot and then use of it would be a criminal offense so the directors of these rackets companies could be held personally responsible.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that's what he means by "mass diallers". Mass diallers don't reach everyone, they call X numbers at once and connect to the first one that picks up. So effectively, all they do is let you talk to a random person from a selection. There is thus no purpose for them whatsoever other than cold calling.
Many of us have chosen not to be slaves to anyone who may email us or send a text message, immediately looking at our device when a notification alarm is triggered. Alerts like for weather, disaster, or amber (kidnapping) are used very sparingly, and are usually via cellphone networks, not internet. A phone ringing implies there is a live person at the other end of the circuit who needs to talk to you NOW.
Send be a text or email notice, and I may not see it for a day or two.
"Hacen't they heard of the internet?" [sic]
In the US they prefer to have a single supplier of internet connectivity for each region, who will then charge them huge amounts of money for a (by UK standards) terrible connection. And then will charge more for anyone actually using that bandwidth.
I'm not sure why they prefer it like that, but they allow the companies to pay the politicians loads of money to keep it that way so I can only assume it's by choice.
That's right isn't it Americans? ;)
Perhaps schools, even non-governmental, to notify parents of closures, threats, etc. But yes, few organizations should need automated, mass dialers.
Sequential dialers are bad (they start at xxx-xxx-0001 and increment up, not caring if the number is valid or not), but predictive dialers should be effin banned,
Predictive dialers are programmed with basic statistics that predict what percentage of people can be expected to answer their phone at a particular time. Say it’s 30%, so it makes ten calls for every three available call agents you have, decreasing the wait time agents have between calls. If more calls are answered than there are available agents, the system just hangs up on some, then calls them back a few minutes later. To avoid wasting their time, they don’t hesitate to waste yours. There is a special place in hades for companies using that technology.
While there are hardware ones, and you could probably ban them, it would be very difficult to tell the difference between a call center using a software autodialer and a call center doing normal jobs. The call center people just say "I finish a call, and my headset rings again. It's not my fault that we're busy", while the admin people say "We just manage the employees and make sure they answer all the incoming calls we have, and also we have to call some of our clients back because they've agreed to it." By the time anyone investigates, the IP phone system has been reprogrammed, so nobody knows for sure what exactly they were doing.
ACT response is still listed as active on companies House and I couldn't see any documents listed about insolvency:
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/03645169/filing-history
Same with Secure Home Systems:
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/09015475/filing-history
“Both businesses can get a 20 per cent reduction if they pay by 28 November.
Or a 100% discount if they go into liquidation.
Apart from jailing the directors, it’s about time we consider a threat against employees. If you are making outbound calls all day and almost every caller tells you to fuck off as they are on the TPS you need to at some point realise that the business is breaking the law and that by not whistleblowing the activity you are furthering the breaking of the law. You are at some point committing personal fraud by perpetuating the marketing calls.
I know this isn’t really a practical rememdy, it is the business owners (and managers) who should be held accountable, but as an upstanding moral citizen, would you continue to work for one of these businesses without calling out the issue?
I know this isn’t really a practical rememdy, it is the business owners (and managers) who should be held accountable, but as an upstanding moral citizen, would you continue to work for one of these businesses without calling out the issue?
Depends how much rent I had to pay, and how many kids I had to feed.
Welcome to modern slavery. The next person who calls it the 'Gig Economy' I am going to set their beard on fire and ram their scooter right up their &*^%.
I once got to see a call center using a "predictive" dialing system. That was in the late '80's. Yeah, this crap has been around that long. Call center workers sit in front of a terminal with a head set on. Information on the person being called is pulled up in front of them automatically. The computer predicts when the current call will end--and starts dialing the next call with the objective to have call center worker talking to the next party before they have a chance to take a breath. That way the call center can pound out the calls like a machine gun.
I've seen a number of call centers, political, corporate, non-profit; they're all very depressing places.