The boss of a boiler replacement company that bombarded people with almost one million nuisance calls has been banned from running a company for six years.
Ashley Dodwell ran Making it Easy which broke rules on telephone messages after spamming people with calls between May and December 2018 in a bid to sell services.
The calls were made to those registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS), which is supposed to ensure their numbers are not targeted by unsolicited marketers.
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It is against the law to make marketing calls to numbers that have been registered with the TPS for more than 28 days unless people have given consent.
Making It Easy, based in Clydebank, made 1,067,293 marketing calls overall between the two dates in 2018. Of those, 853,769 were spam calls made to numbers registered with the TPS.
The company was fined £160,000 by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) in July 2019 for the nuisance calls but ceased trading three weeks later and was later placed into liquidation.
Dodwell, 37, of Glasgow, has now been disqualified from acting as a company director for six years following an investigation by the Insolvency Service.
They said she "failed to ensure that Making It Easy Limited complied with its statutory obligations under The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003."
In total, there were 197 official complaints registered about unsolicited direct marketing calls made by the company.
Most people said that, despite being able to see the number of the caller, they could not identify the firm.
One complainant said: "I cannot find any company details for this number. They claim to be National Heating Advisory Service."
Another added: "They call themselves the Heating Advice Centre and all speak with Scottish accents despite the number being a Swansea STD code."
The ICO traced the identified phone numbers back to the firm.
The company said that it had bought the numbers from third parties but had failed to check if they were registered with the TPS. It could not provide any evidence that consent had been given.
The Insolvency Service's case report into Miss Dodwell states: "Between 14 May 2018 and 17 December 2018, records held by the Information Commissioner's Office show that 853,760 direct marketing calls were made by Making It Easy to individual subscribers registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS).
"Between 14 May 2018 and 17 December 2018, the ICO received 197 complaints from individuals who alleged that they had received unsolicited direct marketing calls as they had been registered with the TPS for at least 28 days and had not provided their consent to the calls.
"A further 25,318 calls were made to TPS registered individuals after the first notification was received from the ICO on 14 November 2018.
"Following its investigation, the ICO was satisfied that Making It Easy knew or ought to have known that there was a risk that contravention of regulation 21 of the The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 would occur."
