Ticketek has been fined $515,040 for text and email spam breaches last year.
The ticket seller had been under investigation from the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) since late 2022, and had received at least two investigation reports since.
It initially said that it sent some messages, since deemed to be spam, in error because some customers had multiple accounts linked to a single email address, and had unsubscribed “from one account but not the other accounts”.
In June this year, Ticketek found it had made data analysis errors on its end that led to it over-stating the volume of messages it had sent.
“Ticketek… reported errors had occurred in the coding it used to analyse its data,” a new ACMA investigation report states. [pdf]
“These errors included calculating the number of contraventions using calendar days rather than business days, counting duplicated data and including messages sent to customers who had not unsubscribed.”
ACMA said that once the data errors were excluded, a clearer picture emerged as to what had occurred.
In total, ACMA said Ticketek “sent around 41,000 marketing texts and emails without the consent of recipients and around 57,000 texts and emails to people who had previously unsubscribed.”
ACMA said that Ticketek essentially “mischaracterised some emails as being non-commercial because they contained event information for ticket holders and therefore [were incorrectly] considered them exempt from spam rules.”
“Even if the purpose of a message is to provide factual information to customers, if it also includes marketing content, or links to marketing content, it can only be sent with consent,” ACMA Chair Nerida O’Loughlin said in a statement.
“It is also incredibly frustrating for people to take the time to unsubscribe only for those requests to not be actioned. Businesses must have working systems in place to comply with consumer choice and consent.
In addition to the financial penalty, Ticketek entered a three-year court-enforceable undertaking “requiring it to appoint an independent consultant to review its compliance with spam rules and to make improvements where needed.”