CommBank Australia have breached the spam rules again for the second time in less than 18 months.
👉 Background: CommBank is the biggest bank in Australia with over 17 million customers. And their share price has been bonkers this year too - up nearly 25% (or more than $50 billion).
👉 What happened: But despite this growth, CommBank has had a fair few mishaps recently. In May 2023, CommBank paid a $3.55 million fine for sending 65 million emails without a working unsubscribe options.
👉 What else: Now, they have breached the spam rules again for the second time in less than 18 months. This time, they sent 170 million emails to customers without the necessary option to unsubscribe. CommBank copped a $7.5 million fine for its laxness (or about 4.4 cents per spam email).
💡Sending emails is pretty cheap, but the cost of breaching these laws are becoming quite costly for a company’s reputation.
💡Companies with large databases can easily send out emails for free. But in Australia, we’ve got pretty strict laws around spammy emails under the Spam Act, including the fact that customers need to be able to unsubscribe from marketing emails.
💡ACMA has been actively cracking down on the practice over the past 18 months, and has issued more than $15 million in spam and telemarketing penalties over the past 18 months to various companies, like Ticketek, Uber Eats, Pizza Hut and Kmart.
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