Woolies fined $1m over spam blitz

Woolworths has been forced to pay a record million dollar fine for spamming customers after they had unsubscribed from promotional messages.

Shoppers at a Woolworths supermarket in Sydney. Picture: AFP

Woolworths has been forced to pay a record million dollar fine for spamming customers after they had unsubscribed from promotional messages.

The supermarket chain was fined for sending five million messages to customers after they had unsubscribed from their message service between October 2018 and July 2019.

The Australian Communication and Media Authority (ACMA) said the infringement notice for $1,003,800 was the largest it had ever issued.

ACMA says it is an offence under the Spam Act to send commercial electronic messages without consent. Businesses have five business days to action a request by a customer to unsubscribe. After that, an offence is committed for each message sent without consent.

Authority chair Nerida O’Loughlin said the spam rules had been in place for years.

“The spam rules have been in place for 17 years and Woolworths is a large and sophisticated organisation,” she said. “The scale and prolonged nature of the noncompliance is inexcusable.”

She said Woolworths failed to comply with the Spam Act even after ACMA had warned it of potential compliance issues, after receiving consumer complaints.

The undertaking requires Woolworths to appoint an independent consultant to review its systems and implement improvements.

Woolworths has also agreed to undertake training, and to report all noncompliance it identifies to the ACMA during the three-year term of the court undertaking.

Woolworths is not the only company to fall foul recently of the regulator.

In January Singtel Optus had to shell out $504,000 for sending spam SMS and email marketing messages between June and December 2018.

ACMA said in the same month, vacation timeshare marketing company Wyndham Destinations paid $159,600 after it failed to show it had the authority to made calls to the Do Not Call Register.

It also failed to terminate calls after recipients said they did not wish to continue, said ACMA.

Late last year Sydney-based online marketplace Oneflare was fined $75,600 for sending commercial SMS messages to phone numbers it found on public directories. It also sent commercial SMS messages without an unsubscribe option – which also breaches the Spam Act.

Compliance with spam and telemarketing rules is still a headache for the regulator.

ACMA said that between January and March this year it completed three investigations and sent 884 compliance alerts to businesses on this problem.

It says businesses have paid more than $1,753,500 for ACMA-issued infringement notices for breaking spam and telemarketing laws in the past 12 months.