A company was today fined €1,500 plus costs for electronic spamming in the first case of its kind in Ireland.
The 4's A Fortune company last month pleaded guilty to the offence, which involved making random calls to mobile phones, hanging up, and providing a premium rate competition number to callers who rang back.
The Data Protection Commissioner mounted a year long investigation into the company after receiving complaints from customers.
Today prosecuting barrister Philipp Rahn told Richmond District Court in Dublin the calls amounted to an unsolicited inducement to contact the premium number.
"A missed call was received on the person's phone and when the person called back there was then a message to ring a premium number saying you had been awarded €50 credit to play this game," he said.
The company was fined €300 for each of five complaints from mobile phone users who had received the missed call, plus costs of €1,000.
The maximum fine it could have received was €3,000 for each offence. Imposing the fine, Judge Ann Watkin said the offence was a serious enough matter and that the five phone users had not been recompensed for the money they spent calling the premium line.
"There are five victims in relation to this, albeit in a minor way," she said.
Speaking outside the court Sean Sweeney of the Data Protection Commissioner's office said the callers had no idea who the missed call was from and in one instance the recipient was worried by a call out of the blue because they had a sick relative in hospital.
He said last year unsolicited text message marketing was the top complaint to his office but that cold calling was the biggest problem now.
After the case Tom Higgins, from Manor Kilbride, Co Wicklow, the director of 4's A Fortune, said the company had made a technical mistake in using numbers from a database they did not have permission to use.
The company apologised immediately and have changed its systems to avoid a repeat of the incidents.
"I think the office of the Data Commissioners has been very fair all along, they're obliged to prosecute all complaints and I think the fine was not unduly harsh," Mr Higgins said.
"We pleaded guilty because we did make the mistake of using a database we shouldn't have used. We did wrong inadvertently and it was a minor error on our part.
Asked if psychics from the other premium line he owned, Irish Psychics Live, should have forewarned him of his mistake, he joked: "Our psychics will not be that well up on data protection law."
PA