SENDERS of spam in Ireland could soon face prison sentences and large fines. The stiffer penalties are being considered by the Department of Communications as part of a crackdown on abuse of data protection law.

The penalties would apply to all promotional information sent by fax, e-mail or text message to people who have not asked for it. It would also cover the use of automatic dialling machines that ring people with recorded messages.

Last week 4’s a Fortune became the first Irish company to be found guilty of breaching data protection law, by making unsolicited calls to mobile phones. Employees of the firm, whose directors include Tom Higgins of Irish Psychics Live, rang mobile phones but hung up before the calls were answered. When the recipients rang back, a recorded message told them to call a premium rate line to play a quiz game.

The company was fined €300 for each of five complaints made against them to the data protection commissioner and told to pay costs of €1,000. The fines represented 10% of the maximum penalty.

Sean Sweeney of the Data Protection Commissioner’s office said it was happy with the outcome, but would welcome greater penalties. The communications department said it was considering such a move and measures could be included in an upcoming bill.

The Data Protection Commissioner has received a number of informal complaints about a recorded message left on the answering machines of some companies last weekend. The calls, from the “welcome awards hotline”, said their number had been selected to receive a “fantastic award”, but had to call a premium line to claim it. Some firms told the commissioner’s office they received up to 100 such calls. No formal complaint has been lodged, however, so no investigation has been launched.

Unwanted spam messages are an even greater source of irritation than direct marketing. It is estimated that 25% of all e-mails consist of unwanted spam messages.

In Britain the number one spammer in the country has been revealed as Brett Sandiford, a marketing consultant who runs In4tech Solutions in Cheshire. Sandiford uses banks of computers in China and America to target e-mail addresses in Britain at a rate of more than 50,000 a day.

He said last week: “I am doing nothing wrong. I only send to UK business addresses. We only sell commercial products such as contract car hire. We don’t sell Viagra or anything like that. But we don’t hide and people can always contact us and ask to be removed from our mailing list.”

The spamming problem has become so serious that the Cabinet Office recently held a summit with the police, officials and computer industry executives to discuss ways of protecting vital national infrastructure.

E-criminals take advantage of new broadband technology to infiltrate spamming software into computers, often in private homes. These “zombie” machines then generate the spam messages without the owner’s knowledge.

Computer security experts believe that at least 250,000 PCs in Britain have been subverted in this way. Other software that criminals insert into the machines can be used to extract bank and credit card details, a process known as “phishing”. The machines can also bombard businesses with threats to put their computer systems out of order if they do not pay blackmail demands.

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