A Birmingham-based provider of monitored alarms has been fined £100,000 ($132,000) by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) after staff used false identities on marketing sales calls.
TMAC made over 260,000 nuisance calls to numbers registered on the Telephone Preference Service (TPS). People who have signed up to the TPS have specifically opted out from such calls.
The ICO said TMAC deliberately targeted individuals over 60 in “predatory” calls between February and September 2024.
Callers appear to have used scam tactics – hiding their true identity and instead impersonating “a variety of different local crime and fire prevention initiatives” in an effort to trick recipients, the regulator explained.
Read more on nuisance callers: Home Improvement Firm Fined £200k for Nuisance Calls.
According to the ICO, one of TMAC’s directors admitted that the telephone numbers the firm called were included in data that had been “acquired” at a previous company.
Nuisance and scam calls are regulated not by the GDPR but the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR). It mandates that companies cannot make marketing calls to TPS registrants unless they have given explicit consent to do so.
Organizations are required to screen call lists against the TPS register, and callers must identify themselves, make their telephone number visible and provide contact information so recipients can follow up if needed.
“When people register with the TPS it is because they want to protect themselves from unwanted marketing calls. TMAC’s actions showed a brazen disregard for privacy laws – making thousands of intrusive calls each month and failing to identify themselves to the recipients,” said ICO head of investigations, Andy Curry.
“We are grateful to those who reported these calls to us. Public reporting plays a crucial role in our work, and where we see organizations causing harm through unlawful and predatory direct marketing, we will not hesitate to act.”
Spam and Scams Target Victims
Nuisance calls continue to be a problem in the UK despite the efforts of the ICO to enforce the law.
The regulator issued nearly £1m ($1.32m) in fines last year, after at least four companies made millions of unsolicited marketing sales calls. Technology is making it easier to do so at scale.
The worst offender was Green Spark Energy, which made nearly 10 million such calls using automated software to trick elderly and vulnerable people into buying loft insulation.
In the US, the Federal Trade Commission’s battle against nuisance callers has seen complaint volumes more than halve since 2021.
A quarter of Brits and nearly a third (31%) of Americans were exposed to deepfakes in the final quarter of 2024, according to data from Hiya published last year.
