Home improvement marketers fined £370K for unsolicited marketing calls

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has imposed a fine on two home improvement companies for making hundreds of thousands of unlawful marketing calls to people who asked not to be contacted.

Thermotech Wall and Loft Surveys (TWLS) has been fined £240,000. Over a period of six months, the company made over 575,000 calls using so-called robo-call software, which was operated from call centers overseas.

This gave the contacted people the idea that they were talking to someone from the United Kingdom. However, in reality, all they got to hear were scripted lines that were recorded by voice actors and played by call center agents.

The ICO also found WhatsApp messages between TWLS CEO Thomas Vickrage and an overseas call center, encouraging call center agents to keep on calling people with Telephone Preference Service (TPS) registered numbers.

‘TPS’ is the UK’s official do-not-call register for landlines and mobile numbers, allowing people and businesses to opt out of unsolicited sales and marketing calls.

The other company that was fined by the ICO is Jacksons Marketing Ltd (JML). Over the past 11 months, JML made over 230,000 calls to TPS-registered numbers. Call center agents tried to persuade victims that their existing insulation could be hazardous and dangerous.

For these practices, JML was issued a fine of £130,000.

“These companies targeted some of the most vulnerable in our society. They called older people and those who had clearly asked to be left alone, leaving them frightened to answer their own phones. That is completely unacceptable,” Andy Curry, ICO Head of Investigations, said in a public statement.

“Falsely claiming to represent a government scheme to gain people’s trust or suggesting their home could be putting their health at risk are deeply manipulative tactics. People have a right to protection from this kind of intrusive and misleading contact,” he continued.

Last month, the ICO issued a fine of £300,000 to a Manchester-based consultancy firm for sending millions of unlawful text messages to people in debt.