Interest-ing
> payday loans firm has received a £175,000 fine
So can they be charged their own rates of interest for every day they're late paying the fine?
A UK-based payday loans firm has received a £175,000 fine after it was found to have sent millions of spam text messages that provoked thousands of complaints. First Financial violated The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations governing electronic marketing by sending SMS messages without consent. The messages …
Well lets take a normal pay day loan rate of wonga (since i cannot get on to www.firstpaydayloanuk.co.uk) their APR seems to be a mere 5853% which means if they are one month late playing they would end up owing £852 562.50, and if they are one day late paying they would only pay a mere £28 000 per a day.
Should be enought to cover cost of Hired goons if they fail to pay
That's how APR is calculated. It's useful for comparing things like mortgages and car loans, but (since it has to include all the costs and expenses) produces vast numbers for a small loan lasting a few weeks.
Most of these companies charge about 1% a day (simple interest) on top of a small admin fee. For comparison, try working out the APR for going overdrawn on your bank account for a day, or being a day late paying off your credit card (you're going to need a calculator with a lot of digits).
Daily compound interest? That's a fracking robbery....
Well all interest charged of a period of time can be divided down into the equivalent daily rate to give the same overall amount when applied as compound interest. This amount can then be compounded up to a 365 day period to give the APR rate. And if you think that 5800% is high then you should see what the equivalent APR would be if the fees banks charge for unauthorised overdrafts were considered to be loans which needed to be adverstised as with an APR rate!
It's a matter of who you are: If you're slightly less poor than those around you, aggressively ripping people off to get rich the government will understandably come down hard on you. If on the other hand you have more money the government they seem to develop bit of a blind spot...
See the "tax net" mini-cartoon in the current issue of Private Eye. (I'd post a link, but the Private Eye site doesn't seem to have published that particular one).
Two kids fishing with a net. It's about the size of a thimble, so it can only scoop one little fish at a time while the big ones swim unconcernedly by. One kid says, "It's a tax net!"
I find the worse offender is my network operator, does this still work for them?
(Actually it doesn't matter as on my phone there is an option to mark the number as spam and I never see a text from it again. Brilliant).
"I find the worse offender is my network operator, does this still work for them?"
I have to do this with the many SPAMs I get from EE - seems to work...At least I have the pleasure of SPAMing them back, even if they still send them.
7726 is SPAM on a phone's keypad - even easier!
I have to agree though, they didn't go out of their way to advertise this, like actually telling anyone or anything.
This is the first I've heard of it. Maybe they should funnel that £175,000 fine into a TV or radio ad?
They did tell people, but only by sending a text message to their own customers at the time they implemented it, meaning that as not all networks implemented it a the same time it was easy to miss it if you happened to switch from a network that hadn't implemented it to a one that had.
So, for example, I was on Orange when they made the service available and had a text, but O2 had already rolled it out when I switched to them, so I knew about Orange's service but not O2's - at least not until I looked for it.
I always reply to spam SMS I receive, electing to receive a followup call from them. I play along with the call for a bit, consuming their time and patience, and usually end up being passed over to a supervisor where I proceed to express my irritation, politely, that they are employing an SMS spam company to advertise their services - it's very rare that the loan/PPI/ambulance-chaser company has sent out the spam themselves, and they seem to think this absolves them of blame or responsibility.
If I've still managed to keep them on the line (many hang up), I try and encourage the sales agent to think more deeply about the repercussions and impact to people that their sometimes-borderline-immoral service has. Usually the response is "I'm just doing my job", although sometimes they've not really thought about it, so I hope in some small way I can contribute to rotting these companies from the inside.
It's also sometimes fun to encourage them to spout more and more ridiculous lies (yes, they do lie quite blatantly if they think they might get a sale), and then call them out on it.
What a strange idea of fun I have!
That 7726 number has been around for years. I've been forwarding SMS spam to if for five to eight years or so. (Can't remember exactly). I have noticed that in the past couple of years I am getting replies thanking me for passing it on, and asking for the phone number the spam was sent from.
It is nice to see something gets done with this information now. I certainly notice less repeats of spam messages compared with spam in past years.
As to fines... yeah... £100 per SMS sent out should be a better scale. A fine that should be paid by the directors of the company. Otherwise stuff like this just gets written off as a company expense.
Am I alone in thinking that £175,000 is a rather low fine for the actual offence?
The article states "millions of spam SMS Calls" so let's say it was 3 million then the fine is 5.8p per SMS, I would like to see it nearer to 50p per message to be a valid deterrent.
They avoid detection by using unregistered cards, then put their website in the SMS.
This is so stupid I can't think of an analogy, maybe a thief breaks into your house and leaves a card behind saying "I couldn't find any money, so here are my bank details so you can make a donation at your convenience".
Nope, that's not stupid enough.
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Sending a single spam text is arguably a crime so it works out at less than £45 a pop. Perhaps the Government could set a tariff, say £50 a pop for first prosecution, £100 for second and doubling thereafter.
Another thought: make any loans to anyone who responded to the spam text unenforceable by the company. That would stop the mischief overnight.
........................messages included some falsely claiming to be from the recipient’s friends, included SMS messages such as "Hi Mate hows u? I'm still out in town, just got £850 in my pocket from...............
Do people really address each other in that way ? I'd think only if they're the kind who thought Ali G was a real person.