Wild telemarketing, the Guarantor confiscates call center databases

New action of the Privacy Guarantor against wild telemarketing. Call center databases confiscated for the first time and hit the "undergrowth" with penalties for the companies involved. Since this morning, conducted by the Financiers of the Special Unit for the Protection of Privacy and Technological Fraud of Rome in collaboration with the military of the Provincial Command of the Guardia di Finanza of Verona, a vast operation aimed at notifying some measures adopted by the Guarantor and, above all, to confiscate the databases in use by some companies that carried out illegal activities in the field of illegal telemarketing.

The companies involved in the affair were sanctioned (Mas s.r.l.s. for 200,000 euros, Mas s.r.l. 500,000 euros, Sesta Impresa s.r.l. 300,000 euros, Arnia cooperative society for 800,000 euros), and two of them were hit by the confiscation order that takes away the database used to carry out illegal activities. The operation took place simultaneously in the offices of the companies concerned (in Verona and Tuscany) and constitutes the first occasion on which the Guarantor orders the confiscation of the databases of potential customers. The use of the instrument of confiscation - informs the Guarantor - "is the sign of a further increase in the contrast strategy by the Authority, which, on the one hand, is actively collaborating with virtuous operators in the sector for the definitive approval of a code of conduct, but, on the other, does not reduce its control and repression of illegal telemarketing". The activity, resulting from a report by the Compagnia della Guardia di Finanza di Soave (VR), made it possible to identify the four companies concerned, subject to subsequent investigations carried out by the Guarantor with the Special Unit for the Protection of Privacy and Technological Fraud. The same companies have been held responsible for a series of activities in open violation of the legislation on the protection of personal data. In particular, those of Verona (Mas srl; Mas srls), through the acquisition of special illegally produced lists, contacted tens of thousands of subjects, without these having ever given the necessary consent for the processing of their data for marketing purposes, proposing commercial offers of various energy companies, even coming to propose, after a short time, reverse passages between these, in order to increase their commissions. The contracts thus realized were then turned over to the two Tuscan companies for the undue inclusion in the database of the companies, all without any formal assignment and on the basis of a fictitious system of distribution of responsibilities in the field of privacy, merely formalistic and with very serious deficiencies in the adoption of effective security measures for the protection of their systems. Activities that, in short, constitute one of the various forms of the so-called "undergrowth", repeatedly indicated by the Guarantor as the cause of today's expansion of illegal telemarketing: a phenomenon that is fed by assignments and activities outside the rules, but also by insufficient control by large client companies. Today's operation, the result of a partnership governed by the memorandum of understanding between the Guarantor for the protection of personal data and the Guardia di Finanza, is part of the strengthening of the lines of protection of legality, to protect all citizens, in a segment as important as it is delicate.