MSE News: Cold-calling firm Keurboom fined record £400,000 by watchdog

Liquidators were appointed on 23rd March 2017 and there are no assets; so good luck getting that fine!

The problem with current regulation is that it only tries to chase after businesses after the calls have been made – and most of the fines issued by ICO remain unpaid. Companies simply close down and move on.

Claims management companies are regulated by the Claims Management Regulator. Their rules prevent claims management companies and their agents from pounding the streets and banging on doors to drum up business as it causes too much nuisance.

Using the telephone to call millions of people in the hope of finding the few people who may want your service is not an effective marketing method. It causes too much nuisance. It is time the regulations were extended to ban the use of the telephone for finding leads.

As companies that breach CMR regulations can be closed down, this regulation would be very effective. It would cover both companies making calls and companies using leads sourced by telephone.

Current usage of leads collected by telephone and passed onto another company all revolves around the ridiculous notion that someone can somehow "consent" to unsolicited calls from companies they have never heard of.

The number of nuisance calls continues to rise. A decade of regulation has failed and has been seen to fail as it does not address the core issue – stopping the calls being made in the first place.

The point is that it is unacceptable for a business to cause nuisance to thousands or tens of thousands of people in order to find the handful of people who did want their services. The nuisance far outweighs the benefits. This is why those companies are prevented from knocking on doors. Regulation must be brought in to prevent these calls from being made. There are plenty of other ways they could promote their services, including radio, TV, newspaper and magazine adverts, flyers, billboards, etc. In the context of cold calls from companies you have never heard of, arguments about 'consent' are spurious.