Bitcoin Forum

BT has been fined £77,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) after it sent nearly five million nuisance emails to customers

The 4.9 million emails were sent between December 2015 and November 2016 promoting three charity initiatives: the BT `My Donate’ platform, Giving Tuesday and Stand up to Cancer.

During the investigation, BT accepted that emails for Giving Tuesday and Stand up to Cancer were unlawful but disputed the assessment that My Donate emails were direct marketing.

The commissioner found that all of the emails sent constituted marketing and were not simply service messages. These messages were found to have been delivered to recipients who had not given the necessary consent and were therefore sent in breach of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations Act 2003.
 

The ICO found that although BT did not deliberately break the rules, it should have known the risks and it failed to take reasonable steps to prevent them.

ICO head of enforcement, Steve Eckersley, said: “Organisations have a responsibility to ensure they are acting within the law. Where they do not, the ICO can and will take action. This particular investigation was prompted by a concerned member of the public. We investigated the matter and uncovered the full extent of this activity which shows how important it is for people to report nuisance emails.”

That's a lot of emails. That's a lot of emails. How annoying it is. I think that BT deserves more than it. They have created millions of spam emails.
It deserves more punishment. I hope that they will not try it again in the future. Any suspicious activity can be considered as a potential action to the crime.

I think proper justification should be filed to this so that this sort of thing doesn't happen in future.

I think they should be also fined for the way they received the emails, it's probably not legit at all.

If transferring mail would require the sender to make a very small work( just like blockchain blocks require a work to be done before the hash could be found), those companies won't be able to spam emails because it will cost them a lot of money to send such a large amount of emails and they will probably think twice before doing such a movement.
Nowdays when you can send ton of emails for free, it's not a surprise that spam email messages are very common.

The community need to come out with a decentralized mail platform that works just the same as bitcoin works.

This should be in off topic.
This in no way is related to Altcoin or bitcoin or blockchain in any way.
It's Bt, British Telecommunication fined by ICO, Information commissioner office.

Thanks for the clarification. I was wondering what the heck is BT (sounds like a misspelled coin name or something), and then ICO looks like it could be an Initial Coin Offering. Very funny. Yet, it is totally unrelated to altcoins.

lol 77k is a tiny amount for them, I expect they spend more on court costs than that. Good to see a big company getting fined still though.

This is really a huge number. It might disturb with sound at a very emergency moment with very silly issue. I hope they will scrutinize their mailing body before sending promotional mails to their clients.

This is really a remarkable decision taken by ICO. In some situation, these kinda mails are really irritating and concentration breaking. However, they should be more judgmental before sending the mail to the customers.

I think such punishment is good to make others aware of doing such mistakes. This regulation is necessary for keeping the fairness of the system.

This news is kind of confusing. Many investors think it to be FUD.It is heard that, Bitcoin was fined due to sending spammmy emails regarding charity to its customer.

Five million! It's really huge and I am wondering how a server managed the high volume of spam mail. If they did it really, I believe that other companies will check twice more at least before sending any promotional mail to their customers.

Well, very interesting news. I think it is a good step. Moreover I think more justification should be filed on this type of things for future awareness.

The messages were sent without the mutual consent of the recipient and thus this was the violation of the privacy of the users. Even they this wasn’t done intentionally, ICO should have had measures taken in advance to overcome such nuisance. They should have been more proactive in matters like this.

In crypto market there are lots of scams and there are lots of spam based on this you need to choose secure sites also this is really good to hear that they charged 77000 $ based on spam emails because this things are really irritating for us also based on this ICO should careful to do this.

its funny that when Ethereum foundation did the same spam advertising all over the internet, nobody was talking about how bad that was and how they should have been punished!

The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) has fined the BT an amount of 77000 USD for providing approximately five million spam and nuisance emails to the investors and customers.

Spammers got what they deserved. Unfortunately, it is very rare that people who commit offenses on the Internet are punished.