Spam Texter Says £440,000 Fine ‘Is ICO Publicity Stunt’

The UK’s data privacy watchdog has come down hard on two men running a spam texting operation, handing them a total of £440,000 in fines, but one of the accused has labelled the penalty a “publicity stunt”.

Christopher Niebel and Gary McNeish, joint owners of Tetrus Telecoms, have been told by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to cough up for allegedly sending “millions of unlawful spam texts”, since the firm was set up in 2009.

The company has been accused of sending spam texts without the consent of the recipient and without identifying the sender, as the law requires. Replies were used to generate leads that were then sold on to other companies.

Spam a lot of people…

One example spam text read: “CLAIM TODAY you may be entitled to £3500 for the accident you had. To claim free, reply CLAIM to this message. To opt out text STOP. Thank you.” Others focused on PPI (Payment Protection Insurance) complaints.

The ICO said it received over 400 complaints connected to Tetrus’ activity. The regulator is also considering issuing penalties to three other companies believed to be in breach of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR).

An 18-month investigation saw raids at the company’s Stockport premises and at the Tetrus headquarters in Manchester. The ICO claimed the firm was sending 840,000 illegal text messages a day via phones with unregistered SIM cards with an income of between £7,000 and £8,000 a day.

But Niebel has slammed the ICO’s actions, saying no evidence had been shown to him by the regulator. “To date the ICO has not provided any evidence to me and thus the allegations are unsubstantiated,” he said in a statement. “The financial benefit which the ICO have alleged I have received is entirely incorrect,”

“It is unfortunate that the ICO have chosen to undertake a publicity campaign in respect of this matter when their allegations, and the conduct of their investigation, have not yet been subject to examination before the Court. I strenuously deny the allegations and I am appealing.”

Gary McNeish was not contactable at the time of publication. He has attracted media attention before, however, having told the Daily Telegraph last year he bought numbers and personal data of 750,000 British mobile users from a call centre in India for a few thousand pounds.

He sold data from those who replied to texts on to a company called RT Analytics, making between £5 and £20 for each batch of information.

A forum posting from 2009 from Chris Niebel indicated the company was sitting on a file with records for “every business in the UK with contact details”.

“We are a telecoms company and use this file to promote our own products,” it read. “We are looking to sell this file in order to generate funds for a large project we are currently working on.”

Below is an ICO diagram showing how spam texters make money:

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