Thursday, August 30, 2007

SMS spam from Nedbank

The law is definitely flawed! I was certain that we could improve on it by getting some precedent but I'm no longer confident that it's going to happen.

Through ISOC-ZA I set up the Spammer Bounty Hunter programme (read more at http://wiki.isoc.org.za). The wiki refers to the legislation which states that "Any person who sends unsolicited commercial communications to consumers, must provide the consumer— (a) with the option to cancel his or her subscription to the mailing list of that person; and (b) with the identifying particulars of the source from which that person obtained the consumer’s personal information, on request of the consumer."

I was getting annoying sms spam from Nedbank and lodged a complaint with WASPA see the complaint form here. It was handled pretty well and although it didn't take the promised 7 days, they did finally remove me from their database and tell me where they obtained my telephone number. So effectively the complaint was resolved and they get off the hook.

More importantly the company who sold them my details is also off the hook. Seems like the law cannot touch them. Maybe there's something in the privacy legislation, I don't know. I had to expose them somehow and hope that you can assist me to take some action against ETL. I've tried to get in touch with a manager but they do not take or return calls (which I can understand too).

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1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I would love to know if you had any luck in getting hold of ETL. I had the same problem except I bank with Nedbank :-( but I never allowed them to send me any marketing material yet I got SMS'ed. I also contacted WASPA and they did help me resovle it. I was never able to find out where they got my details though

9:02 pm  

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