Manchester PPI claims firm hit with fine for sending millions of spam texts

A firm in Manchester has been handed a £120,000 fine for sending out more than three million unlawful texts about its services.

Hall and Hanley, which specialises in advising people on claiming for PPI refunds, sent 3,560,211 direct marketing text messages between January 2018 and June 2018 about compensation claims.

The Information Commissioners Officer fined the PPI claims management company, which is based in Devonshire Street North £120,000.

The ICO launched an investigation after it became aware of a large number of complaints about the company.

It found that Hall and Hanley, which had used a third party for this work, did not have valid consent as required by law.

Steve Eckersley, ICO Director of Investigations, said: ”Companies which are responsible for generating these types of marketing messages should make sure they are operating legally or face a potential fine.

“Hall and Hanley should have known better. The laws on these types of marketing messages are strict because they can be very intrusive.”

Hall and Hanley claimed that consent to send the marketing had been obtained when people subscribed to one of four websites.

However Hall and Hanley were named on only two of these websites’ privacy policies and people were required to give consent to receive marketing from third parties as a condition of subscribing – which is against the law.

The messages generated a total of 1353 complaints to the 7726 spam reporting service and directly to the ICO.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) upholds information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals.