Exclusive: Manchester companies fined for sending millions of spam messages

Dear readers — welcome to this week’s briefing. It was the Manchester half marathon yesterday, with 24,000 people taking part; we hope those of you who were among them weren’t too sore getting back into work today. We also hope friends and loved ones who went to support wrapped up warm. Thankfully, our weatherman has some good news for this coming week. Also in today’s newsletter: two Manchester-based companies fined £150,000 for sending spam messages, a look at the slow-motion car crash that is Tameside Council right now, and the MEN’s new campaign to save Salford Lads club. 

Over the weekend, we published a fantastic piece by Mollie that looked at sensitivities around the University of Manchester’s push to attract more overseas students, raising questions around whether the university is vetting students’ English abilities thoroughly enough to make sure they are getting the most out of, and fully understanding, their courses. “Another excellent Mill article,” commented one subscriber. Read it below.

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🌦️ This week’s weather

Our local weatherman Martin Miles says this week will be “turning warmer but increasingly unsettled”. The best days are set to be tomorrow and Thursday.

🌥️ Tuesday Dry, mild and mostly cloudy. Turning breezier as the day progresses. 14°C.

🌦️ Wednesday Very mild but often wet with heavy showers and occasional longer spells of rain. 18°C.

🌥️ Thursday️ Mostly dry and mild but with large amounts of cloud cover overhead. Light winds. 15°C.

🌦️ Friday Windy with showery rain and mostly cloudy skies. Still feeling mild. 15°C.

🌥️ Weekend Mild into the weekend, but remaining autumnal with unsettled and breezy conditions.

You can find the latest forecast at Manchester Weather on Facebook — daily forecasts are published at 6.15am.

The big story: Manchester companies fined for sending millions of spam messages

Top line: Two Manchester-based companies have been fined a collective £150,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for sending nearly 8 million spam messages to people whose contact details they bought from dodgy third party suppliers. They also found the companies collected debt decline data to prey on people they knew were struggling financially.

Context: Spam messages are unsolicited emails or texts that can serve a variety of purposes. 

They could be trying to sell products or services, scam you into sharing personal information or just generally proselytise about things like social media posts (to drive engagement) or public campaigns. 

Details: Quick Tax Claims, a company offering help with PPI tax refunds, was incorporated in 2022 and only lists its director Ali Omar as staff. The ICO found that Omar had sent 7,863,547 text messages, of which almost 5 million were delivered. They’d normally read as follows:

“Claim your PPI tax refund today! The Personal Savings Allowance means you may be owed £100s. Start your claim now.”

The messages had no “opt-out” option, and the ICO found that Quick Tax Claims had bought contact information from third party vendors who didn't have valid consent. The ICO fined Quick Tax Claims £120,000 as a result. 

The other company: National Debt Advice, incorporated in 2015 and directed by the Carden family in Salford Quays. Though it sent far fewer messages than Quick Tax Claims, they were more targeted. 

For example, the company obtained loan decline data, allowing it to send messages to people who were recently turned down for loans. According to the ICO’s monetary penalty notice, these messages told people they were entitled to a “Government-backed Debt Write Off Scheme”. 

The ICO’s head of investigations, Andy Curry, described this practice as “preying on those who might be experiencing difficult financial circumstances,” adding that “to then be hounded by numerous unwarranted text messages just adds further stress to people in those situations”.

Bottom line: National Debt Advice were fined £30,000 for sending 129,902 spam messages over a four month period, and not making “the most basic of checks” and relying on claims of third-party consent. When we reached out to its director Danielle Carden, we received no response. We also sent questions to Quick Tax Claims, but received no response.

Your Mill briefing

💥Tameside Council imploded over this past week with a string of high-profile resignations, including chief executive Sandra Stewart and council leader Ged Cooney. The turmoil follows a report by the children’s commissioner that almost removed the town’s children’s services from council control after repeated failures to improve. Cooney said he no longer had the backing of the council. Local Conservative councillor Liam Billington told BBC Radio Manchester the council was in “disarray and chaos” and was no longer fit for purpose.

📖 Fun little fact: according to Aura Print, a commercial printer, Manchester is the fourth most mentioned city in literature from around the world, behind London (obviously), Cambridge and Oxford. Aura Print searched Google Books (which lists 25 million books) and found 23,578,466 mentions of Manchester from 1920 to 2019. Most of the mentions, interestingly, were made in the ‘20s.

🏛️ Protect Duty, known more commonly as Martyn’s law, was debated in the House of Commons today. Named after Martyn Hett, one of the 22 who died in the Manchester Arena bombing, the bill is a result of years of campaigning by Hett’s mother, Figen Murray. She told the BBC she thought the legislation could save lives, and she would "know at some level that Martyn hasn't died for nothing".

📈 Some interesting stats in this piece by the Observer about the impact the BBC has had on the city after moving 4,000 of its staff to Salford Quays between 2011 and 2017. In short: “it had transformed Salford’s creative industry”, writes Torsten Bell. Every BBC role created 0.55 additional creative private sector jobs, or 2,000 in six years. Not only that, but 220 other creative businesses were created in that time, and wages increased by 8%.

💸 The MEN has launched a campaign to save Salford Lads Club, which is in dire straits financially, needing £250,000 by the end of November to avoid closure. Rising costs and less grant money means the institution is struggling to keep up the youth services it has been providing since 1904. You can donate to the MEN’s fundraiser here.

Home of the week 

This one-bedroom flat in Victoria Mill in Reddish has high ceilings and beautiful exposed-brick walls. It’s on the market for £120,000.

Our favourite reads

“If Only I Could Begin Again!” — Harper’s Magazine

This piece looks at the career of Margaret Jameson, whose writing appeared under the name Storm Jameson. Jameson was born in Whitby, but her memoirs detail a “gypsy existence” travelling through Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds in the early 1900s, later becoming a journalist and novelist, but ultimately finding her voice writing memoir. Vivian Gornick asks the question of why some writers are so much more suited to that form (James Badwin for example) and, in Jameson’s case, what she “would have produced had she come earlier to the genre in which she wrote most naturally”. 

The prison where murderers play for Manchester United — The Guardian

We went back into the Guardian archives for this classic piece about Luzira prison in Uganda, once the country’s most notorious. It developed its own football league with teams named after pro teams like FC Barcelona, Juventus and, of course, Manchester United. “Liverpool and Manchester United remain the largest clubs in the prison, reflecting the huge support enjoyed by their namesakes within the wider Ugandan population,” writes David Goldblatt, who visited the prison to cover one of its knockout tournaments.

Our to do list

Tuesday

🎶 Stuart Murdoch, best known as the the vocalist and songwriter in Belle and Sebastian, will be performing songs and readings to celebrate his autobiographical novel Nobody’s Empire at Band on the Wall, which chronicles an ambitious musician’s struggle with chronic fatigue syndrome in 1990s Glasgow. £20.

⛪ Writer Robert Pegg is giving a talk on Elizabeth Prout, a Victorian-era nun who dedicated her life to helping Manchester’s poor, at the Catholic Chaplaincy on Oxford Road from 6pm. We published a story about why Elizabeth Prout deserves her own statue in August: read more here.

Wednesday

📚 André Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name and Enigma Variations, is discussing his novel Gentleman from Peru at Waterstone’s on Deansgate, which tells the story of a group of friends marooned on the Amalfi coast who meet a mysterious man with a story of epic love. £10.

🎻 Mabe Fratti, an experimental cellist and singer based in Mexico City, is performing a solo gig at SOUP. Her recent album, Sentir que no sabes, was described by Pitchfork as “the kind of record that requires you to surrender to it, to listen meticulously and without expectation”. £16.

Thursday

🧣 The Methodist Hall on Oldham Street will be embellished with scarves this Thursday to raise awareness about Lewy Body, the second most common form of dementia in older people. The scarves are lovingly hand-knitted by people from all corners of the UK and as far as the USA, an awareness initiative first started by charity ambassador Vicky Hands. More here.

🎭 Lizzie, a true crime rock musical about Lizzie Borden, a girl accused of murdering her father and stepmother with an axe in the summer of 1892, is showing for a limited run at Hope Mill Theatre. Tickets here.

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