Samuel Dale reports:
The Advertising Standards Authority has intervened five times in just over a month to stop an IFA’s lead generation firm sending “unwanted” communications and “breaching personal data”.
Lead generation firm TAB Finance has been wrapped by the ASA for five separate breaches since 10 October after sending “unwanted” communications to people who have been wrongly identified as leads in the mortgage, loans and debt management industries.
TAB Finance director Simon Durrans is also financial adviser working at Huddersfield-based DML Independent Financial Advisers.
ASA intervenes to stop communications when an organisation obtains, processes, manages or uses information to specifically target individuals to market products or services.
An ASA spokesman says it cannot give details of the specific breaches by TAB, but added breach of personal data can include continuing to send emails that people have opted out of and unsolicited texts and phone calls.
Read more on MortgageStrategy.
Being totally ignorant about the ASA, I read a bit on their site to find out what authority they have and what consequences might be for a breach. It appears that they are an independent regulator of advertising across all kinds of media and broadcasting. Businesses are supposed to self-regulate and comply with their standards. If they don’t, some sanctions are available, including, but not limited to, naming and shaming. More severe consequences are also available.
If you read their section on Sanctions, tell me what you think the equivalent of ASA would be here in our system – if we have an equivalent. What regulatory agency do we have here – other than the FTC – that would deal solely with advertising in the way ASA does?