16m automated phone calls results in director ban

A Coventry company director who ran marketing business Easyleads, has been banned from acting as a director for six years.

Shaun Harkin was the sole director of Easyleads, which was the source of a large number of complaints made to the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) arising from its use of automated marketing and sales calls from October 2015 to July 2016.

Harkin, who had previously run a company which had come to the attention of the ICO for breaching Telephone Preference Service (TPS) rules preventing unsolicited calls being made to numbers that are registered with the TPS, was warned in January 2017 by the ICO of their investigation into the new series of complaints.

Harkin persisted in his practice, and started a new campaign, again using automated calls, which resulted in more complaints being made to the ICO between January and June 2017. The ICO took action in September 2017, when they issued a fine of £260,000 to Easyleads, which the company failed to pay. As a result, the ICO issued a petition to the courts in February 2018 to have the business wound up.

Following the winding up order, the Insolvency Service took a hand in proceedings, and they discovered that Easyleads had made 16m automated marketing calls to members of the public, which resulted in hundreds of complaints from people who had, amongst other things, received multiple calls, sometime early in the morning.

Andy Curry, who headed up the ICO investigation said: “Easyleads plagued people with calls and we brought them to account by fining them £260,000. When they failed to pay, we refused to give up. Now Shaun Harkin has been put out of action for six years. We still have work to do but this ban sends a message to others that they will not get away with making nuisance calls.”