One household received 470 calls from the company

Apr 1, 2015 14:26 GMT  ·  By

A personal injury claims company from Bolto, UK, was slapped with an £80,000 (€110,000 / $118,000) fine by the country’s privacy watchdog for making direct marketing calls without prior consent from the recipients.

The firm, Direct Assist Ltd, was relentless in its approach to gain a few customers, and in one case, its employees contacted a home no less than 470 times.

Direct Assist knowingly ignored the law

More than this, in one of the complaints filed with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) an individual reported that Direct Assist told them that the calls would probably continue for three years until they made a claim.

The company offers assistance for personal injury claims through services of a solicitor, advertising that if the client loses, there would be no fee paid to Direct Assist.

In a blog post on Wednesday, ICO says that all the complainants were registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS), a free option for UK residents that allows them to directly express their wish not to receive marketing or sales calls, unless the caller has their consent.

“It is a legal requirement that all organisations (including charities, voluntary organisations and political parties) do not make such calls to numbers registered on the TPS unless they have your consent to do so,” the website of the service says.

Company received 525 TPS requests to cease its aggressive marketing

However, in the case of Direct Assist, there was no consent from the recipient of the call, who also asked the caller to remove the contact details from the database.

According to an investigation from ICO, the staff of the company was instructed to deliberately use phone numbers even from lists that included TPS-registered people.

More than this, the personal injury firm was contacted by TPS 525 times to warn about complaints coming in about its law-defying practices.

“Following service of the final notice by the ICO on the company, and at the request of HMRC, Direct Assist has now gone into liquidation and the ICO intends to register as an unsecured creditor in an attempt to obtain the fine,” ICO reports.

The penalty notice is dated March 26 and has been issued as per Regulation 21 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR).