ACMA takes gotalk to court over do-not-call violations

Stuart Corner
Monday, 01 March 2010 16:46

IT Policy - Regulation

Telephony and Internet services provider, gotalk's use of Indian call centres for outbound telemarketing in 2007 has come back to haunt it for the second time.

The ACMA has taken gotalk to the Federal Court alleging that two offshore call centres made more than 40,000 telemarketing calls to numbers on the do-not call register on gotalk's behalf.

This follows the ACCC taking action against gotalk over its use of the same call centres. In June 2008 the ACCC announced that it had accepted court enforceable undertakings from gotalk concerning the conduct of its overseas telemarketing agents. The ACCC said that the call centres had made a number of false representations about gotalk and its services.

Gotalk says the court action from the ACMA had come out of the blue 18 months after it last had any communication with the ACMA over the alleged breaches and says that it is, in effect being punished twice for the same alleged offence.

The company issued a statement saying "the allegations made by the ACMA relate to alleged breaches of the Do Not Call Act 2006 which occurred during four months at the end of 2007," and it notes that, because the Act only came into force on 1 July 2007, they occurred "in the very early stages of this new legislation."

Gotalk CEO Steve Picton told iTWire that both the ACCC's and ACMA's actions related to the company's use of Indian call centres, which he said had been "out of control" and which gotalk had ceased using in late 2007.

He said that the ACMA had issued an infringement notice on 28 August 2008 alleging that these call centres had breached the do-not-call rules and that, until a week ago, there had been no significant discussions on the matter since September 2008. "Then last week I got a call from the ACCC saying they were filing on Wednesday."

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