UPDATE ICO Fine True Telecom £85K for Nuisance Calls and Impersonating BT

Kent based broadband ISP True Telecom, which is already in hot water with Ofcom over their handling of service migrations (here), has been fined £85,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office for “making illegal nuisance calls” and giving “the impression they were from BT” (Openreach).

According to the ICO, True Telecom spent two years (between April 2015 and April 2017) calling people who were registered on the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) and those who had specifically asked the firm not to contact them. Some 201 people complained about this, with the ICO noting that the “calls were misleading because callers gave the impression they were from BT Openreach and the number was withheld.”

Steve Eckersley, the ICO’s Head of Enforcement, said:

“The rules around nuisance calls are clear. There’s no excuse for making marketing calls to people who have explicitly asked not to receive them. These calls are at best annoying and at worst downright distressing, and companies who pester the pubic in this way must understand they won’t get away with it. The ICO will take action.”

The commissioner has also issued a monetary penalty notice, which includes further details of the case, and told the company to stop its “illegal practices” or face court action. We suspect that this might not be the last time that the provider receives a fine.

Ofcom are also debating whether or not to impose a penalty against them after they found “reasonable grounds for believing” that True Telecom had breached several consumer protection rules, which related to their alleged mishandling of service migrations and contracts, including suspected SLAMMING.

The ICO’s penalty notice also includes a number of examples where the complainants claimed that True Telecom had been impersonating BT (Openreach). We suspect that BT won’t be too pleased about this sort of behaviour either.

Sample of the Call Complaints

Example 1 = “She said she was from Openreach and that they could offer me a cheaper deal than I was paying. Got very aggressive when I refused to give bank details.”

Example 2 = “Claimed to be BT Openreach initially, then mis-sold me a product without my permission (I said I’d think about it). I have also complained to Ofcom.”

However the ICO has also said that their fine could be reduced by 20% to £68,000, albeit only if the provider pays in full by 6th October 2017. On the other hand if True Telecom chooses to appeal then they will not benefit from the discount.

Apparently True Telecom claims to have collected the contact details by “data scraping” (i.e. going online and finding related information in the public domain). The ISP said they used TPS screening software alongside this, although they also say that some of the data was made available to an outbound sales team, which didn’t use the same checks (this occurred after the departure of a previous IT manager).

We have asked True Telecom for a comment and are awaiting their response.

Side Note: The ICO notes that True Telecom had been warned before (in 2014) after 50 people complained about True Telecom’s direct marketing calls. At the time the ICO proposed more of an educational approach rather than enforcement, which clearly didn’t have the desired effect.

UPDATE 12:15pm

The ISP has responded below.

A Spokesperson for True Telecom told ISPreview.co.uk:

“As an organisation who supplies communication services to business throughout the UK, we take TPS screening and Data Management extremely seriously.

It was identified that we suffered a technical issue within our TPS screening process which led to these unfortunate events occurring. We are extremely disappointed this system error led to the 201 businesses slipping through the net during the 2 year period. We would like to formally apologise to each of the 201 business that were affected by this system error and reconfirm that no intentional deviation from regulation has ever been intended.

We continually assess our processes and have heavily invested in a more robust solution which has completely eliminated the possibility of these types of issue reoccurring again in the future. To add some context, our outbound sales teams contacted over 5 million businesses during this period. We also note that in comparison to other cases of this nature, we feel the fine stated is somewhat disproportionate when considering other companies have been fined a lesser amount for over 100,000 individual cases Vs 201 True Telecom cases.

True telecom welcomes any and all guidance from ICO moving forwards and have been working very closely with them to ensure no more issues are experienced in the future.”