A WEST WALES based company has been fined for making nuisance calls just a week after another was punished for the same offence. This has taken place as a Herald investigation has revealed that many companies working in the telesales industry in west Wales are connected by common directors or shareholders.
Miss-sold Products UK had a call centre in Ammanford where they employed up to 15 call centre agents. Those agents made 75 million nuisance calls in just four months – between November 2015 and March 2016 – most of which were from an automated dialler.
Now the company, which had its registered office in a terraced house in Milford Haven at the time, has been fined £350,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). That is a registered address shared by several other call centre type companies.
Last week Port Talbot-based Barrington Claims Ltd was also fined – this time £250,000 – after making more than 15 million automated PPI calls, between February and May 2016. That company, which is not connected to Miss-Sold, had failed to ensure automated marketing calls were sent to individuals who had consented to receive marketing.
Miss-Sold Products UK Ltd was a Payment Protection Insurance reclaims specialist. Charging customers they sold to an upfront fee, promising they would get more back later once their PPI claims would be settled. The company had previously been known as Penguin Claims Limited until November 2015.
The current director of the company is listed as Douglas Andrew Albury. His address is given as 83 Dulcie Street, Manchester. However a quick check found that this was as copy shop offering mail redirection services. Albury over recent years has been linked to over 37 limited companies. They include several other call centre based business still trading in Ammanford and Carmarthen – his contact address differs depending on which company his is connected with – but his date of birth and middle name show it is the same man. Companies House shows he also has a west Wales address in Neath.
Companies he controls include Your Money Rights Ltd, which is currently trading, and another, Business Advice Bureau UK Ltd, was struck off the register at Companies House as recently as Wednesday (Jan 17).
MILLIONS IN DEPOSITS LOST
Other now dissolved firms that he has been involved with in locally include Scarlet Protect Limited – a reincarnation of a Carmarthenshire based PPI firm which ripped the general public off for millions of pounds.
Albury was also a director of its forerunner, Scarlet Marketing Services Limited – again a PPI reclaim firm – which employed, according to a former member of staff, around 60 call centre staff in offices at King Street Carmarthen. That company was put into voluntary liquidation on December 8, 2016, with almost £5.7m of debts, including over £70k in unpaid fines, £88k owing to HMRC and over £5,000,000 in deposits owing to members of the public.
Your Money Rights Ltd – also known as U Legal – is another firm he was listed as a director of. That firm is still trading
Miss-sold Products UK Ltd made its latest, mostly automated, marketing calls between November 16, 2015, and March 7, 2016. The calls contained recorded messages, primarily promoting PPI compensation claims, but the company did not have the recipients’ consent for making marketing calls, which is against the law.
It also broke the law, the ICO ruled, by failing to identify the organisation making the calls, while it used so-called ‘added value’ numbers that generate revenue when an individual calls the number, which is then apportioned and passed to associated companies and the network carrier.
OVER 100 COMPLAINTS
The ICO received 146 complaints from the public about Miss-sold Products. Some people were called on multiple occasions. Others said they were unable to opt out of receiving the calls. Some expressed further distress as they were concerned that calls late at night may have been from family members or those to whom they provided care.
Albury as director of Miss-sold – which had its registered office at 10A North Road, Milford Haven before it was moved in 2017 to Darlington, County Durham – had applied to strike the firm off the Companies House register but the ICO has blocked the move pending enforcement action.
10A North Road is not an official address, but number 10 is owned by local businessman Adrian Jenkins who was also an officer of the now defunct Business Advice Bureau UK Ltd
A further company of which Albury was a director recently moved its registered office from that Darlington address to the Dulcie Street address in Manchester. Another key player in Miss-Sold was Richard Jones – he has resigned his directorship but is still actively involved in other call centre related businesses in Carmarthenshire.
This is to allow all options to be considered for recovery of the penalty, and for the actions of the director in running the company to be fully scrutinised.
ICO Enforcement Group Manager Andy Curry said: “This company blatantly ignored the laws on telephone marketing, making a huge volume of intrusive calls over a short period of time and without any apparent attempt to ensure they had the consent of the people they were harassing.
“The ICO will come down hard on rogue operators who want to treat the law and the UK public with contempt. We hope the Government will bring forward plans to introduce personal liability for directors as a matter of urgency, to stop them from escaping punishment after profiting from nuisance calls and texts.
“In the absence of a change in the law, the ICO will continue to face challenges in the recovery of penalties, and rogue directors will think they can get away with causing nuisance to members of the public.”
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