Well I’ll be damned, the missed call marketing company DC Marketing Europe was fined $150,000AUD on the 24th of July 2007 for breaching the Australian Spam Act between June and July of 2006. I for one have fallen victim to these extremely annoying and costly spam calls and have cursed the company behind it many times. Well now its time for us to rejoice as these spammers have got what they deserved.
Its unfortunate that the fine was only $150,000AUD when it should have been something along the lines of $500,000AUD (half a million). Even if I don’t get my money back from calling the missed call numbers, I do feel a sense of satisfaction since the bad guys did get punished. I mean seriously, what type of marketing company would employ such an unethical telemarketing technique to promote their client’s products.
For those who do not know what missed call marketing is, in brief, it is a method of making unsolicited short duration calls to victims and hanging up before they actually answer the call, there by leaving a missed call message. This would mean that the victim will return the call to find out what it was about, instead of getting a real person answering the phone, they get a marketing message played back to them at the victim’s expense. In short, missed call marketing methods causes the consumer (or victim) to pay for a marketing message to be forcefully played to them.
Read more about how DC Marketing gets fined. Check out 4Wisemonkey to see their views on this as they have been lobby against missed call marketing for quiet some time.
There is justice after all – Nigerian scammers, YOU’RE NEXT