Banned, cold call cowboys whose firm hounded 2m

TWO directors of a firm that made more than 2.5million nuisance calls have both been banned from running a company for six years.

Allan Brown, 39, and Kenneth Haswell, 30, ran Glasgow-based Nevis Home Improvements, which went into liquidation last year.

The company was fined £50,000 in 2016 following an investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) but failed to pay any of the cash.

The probe found that the firm made 2,530,549 automated marketing calls between May and August 2015.

More than 1.5million people answered

‘Unlawful marketing practices’

the calls, which took the form of recorded sales messages.

The Insolvency Service also launched a probe into the company and its directors, Brown, of Glenboig, Lanarkshire, and Haswell, of Lennoxtown, Dunbartonshire.

The subsequent report noted: ‘Between May 21, 2015, and August 27, 2015, a total of 175 online complaints were received by the ICO relating to calls received from the company, which included calls that were made at inconvenient times, were repeated... did not identify the sender and the option of speaking to a person [was] not always effective.

‘The details provided by complainants demonstrated the detrimental effect that such calls had had on them.

‘A penalty in the sum of £50,000 was issued; the amount of the penalty took account of the fact that the company may have obtained a commercial advantage by generating leads from unlawful marketing practices.’

By law, companies are permitted to play recorded messages only to people who have given organisations their permission to receive calls of this type.

Nevis Home Improvements did not have that consent, the ICO said, and failed to identify itself during the calls.

The company was placed into liquidation in April last year after the ICO took action at Glasgow Sheriff Court over the failure to pay the £50,000 fine.

Last month, a probe was launched into a Clydebank company for allegedly plaguing homes and businesses with 200million illegal calls for new boilers and window replacement schemes.

ICO officials confiscated computers and documents thought to have been used in the Dunbartonshire firm’s seven-month campaign. The watchdog also accused the unnamed company of risking public safety by making repeated calls to a Network Rail signal box ‘clogging up the line’ for people calling to check if it was safe to cross.

The ICO said it would not name the company until the investigation concludes.

In 2016, Glasgow-based Omega Marketing Services was fined £60,000 by the ICO after making 1.6million calls promoting green energy equipment.

An investigation at the time found that the company, run by director Stewart Murdoch, then 33, targeted households even after they had joined the Telephone Preference Service to stop cold calls.

Scots are plagued with more nuisance telephone calls than people in other parts of the UK, with one in three having been targeted 11 times or more in a month, according to consumer magazine Which?.

‘Plaguing homes and businesses’