Spam is endemic to everyone’s email inbox. Some of Australia’s biggest companies have been caught and fined, yet they keep doing it. Andy Schmulow reports.
Mathew Comyn, CEO of Commbank, announced this week his bank will be charging a $3 fee for “assisted withdrawals”. Three dollars to withdraw your own cash from the bank.
Cash, I would remind you, which is “currency of the realm”. This is the same guy who bemoaned “excessive profits tax as “insidious populism” and labelled criticism of profitable businesses as “fact-free rhetoric” that is damaging trust in public institutions.”
Ok, fair point Matthew. I’ll be sure that my rhetoric is not “fact-free”: your bank was labelled as the “gold medallist for misconduct” by the Hayne Royal Commission, for it propensity to commit fraud, theft, and engage in dishonesty and wicked venality on an industrial scale.
Like CBA’s insurance division, CommInsure, that routinely denied death and disability cover to the dying and dead. A financial advice service that routinely forged customer’s signatures and stole money out of their accounts. Most of that criminality took place in the retail division, during the years when Comyn was the CEO.
And let’s not forget the 53,000 breaches of money-laundering laws, the purported “software error”, the slap on the wrist and the insider who said “no one gave a rat’s arse”.
CBA says “software error”. Insider says “no one gave a rat’s arse”
But instead of approaching his tenure as CEO with some measure of humility, in light of the bank’s past failings, Commbank has now hit on another route to gouge customers: charging them to withdraw cash.
And make no mistake, this latest rort will hit the poorest and most vulnerable customers hardest: the elderly, First Australians, Australians who live in rural and remote areas, those who are digitally excluded, and those with low levels of financial literacy.
Commbank spamming
One of the big spam offenders is Commbank, back in the headlines for another ill-conceived customer “service” initiative.
The bank has just been fined $7.5m for being spammer rats. Fined for spewing out 170 million emails that breached the law. Treasurer Jim Chalmers was not amused and apparently ‘leaned on’ the bank to rethink its plans, according to the AFR ($).
Are the executives of the bank, the Chief Technology Officer, not paid enough to ensure that, at the very least, they have a working unsubscribe function on emails? That they don’t send spam to people who have already unsubscribed? It’s not rocket surgery, it’s the law!
And maybe if banks didn’t keep breaking the law, it wouldn’t “damage trust in public institutions”?
This fine comes after the bank paid $3.55m 18 months ago for the exact same breaches!
But wait, there’s more: guess how many “assisted withdrawals” Commbank could cover for the $11,050,000 in fines they’ve paid for being spammer rats? Three million, six hundred and eighty-three thousand!! So, here’s some free business coaching for the Martin Place crew: you can make more profit by not breaking the law than you can by breaking the law and gouging your most vulnerable customers.
CommBank’s Matt Comyn, ASIC face mal-prosecution claims from Unhappy Banking founder Shannon
Woolworths spammer rats
And it’s not just CommBank engaging in practices unbecoming a good corporate citizen. Woolworths is at it again. Not content to be running one half of a duopoly, sucking down a return on equity that is fourteen times higher than the average for supermarkets in the United States and more than twenty times higher than the average in Europe, being integral to the cost-of-living crisis sweeping Australia.
Their outgoing CEO, Brad Banducci, has presided over a company that’s been exposed as a serial bully when dealing with suppliers and exposed for repeatedly jacking up prices, then marginally lowering them to claim they’re being discounted.
As a result, the ACCC is now suing Woolworths for misleading and deceptive conduct. They, too, are serial law-breakers. In 2020, they were fined $ 1m for being spammer rats – the biggest fine for spam up to that date in Australia.
A few weeks ago, I received spam from Woolworths Everyday Rewards – despite unsubscribing multiple times. I called them to complain, and they confirmed that they had on record that I had unsubscribed. They promised to have someone call back to address my complaint. That was three weeks ago, and I’ve heard not a word.
So, I posted the story on LinkedIn and tagged the CEO (Amanda Bardwell – Banducci’s successor) and the Everyday Rewards MD, Hannah Ross.
Now, you might be saying that if Ms Bardwell and Ms Ross were doing their job, they would both be concerned about avoiding more multi-million-dollar fines. And no doubt would have reached out to me immediately to understand what went wrong, why I wasn’t contacted, and explain what steps they would take to ensure this never happened again.
Alas, no! Bardwell has ignored the posts, and Ross, despite her division having already paid a million dollars of shareholders’ funds in unnecessary fines, responded by giving me the flick and blocked me on LinkedIn. No wonder they don’t obey the law. Does their arrogance run that deep?
I have now complained to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), hoping they will take account of the fact that Woolworths is a serial lawbreaker, and double or triple the fine.
Inquiries galore: the chaotic politics of tackling Coles and Woolworths supermarket supremacy
WebCentral and Aussie Home Loans spammer rats
The last time I wrote about the dirty data rats who routinely breach the Spam Act 2003, I wrote about WebCentral – an uncontrollable serial spammer. Since then, the good news is that the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) has initiated an investigation into WebCentral – although this is slow-going.
WebCentral keeps responding with bald-faced lies about how often they breached the Spam Act, which is obviously an intentional effort to frustrate and prevaricate.
In not such good news, I am still waiting for the OAIC to initiate an investigation against one of the worst data rats of all: Aussie Home Loans (a division of Lendi). They sent me spam text messages and emails in late 2023. I had never been a customer of either company. I merely made one enquiry on one occasion, once, eleven – yes, ELEVEN – years ago.
National Privacy Principle 11.2 states that customer data must not be retained for an unreasonable length of time. How long is reasonable? Maybe it’s six months? Maybe it’s a year? Heck, maybe it’s 18 months?
But no one could argue that 11 years is a reasonable amount of time. I tagged David Hyman, CEO of Lendi, in my LinkedIn posts. Not a word from him. But a stream of drivel from Aussie trying to explain how they were still in possession of my data after 11 years.
It’s our data!
And this is where we get to the core of the issue: my data and your data. It is our data. It belongs to us. It is our property.
It does not belong to Woolworths or ConBank or WebCentral or Aussie Home Loans. These companies need to be taught the hard way that they must respect our data and privacy and uphold the law.
Unfortunately, however, that doesn’t work fining the company. Fining the company is a cost to shareholders, not a cost to Matty Comyn (CBA) or Amanda Bardwell (Woolworths) or Joe Demase (WebCentral) or David Hyman (Aussie HomeLoans). Unless and until we visit consequences on CEOs for repeated breaches of data and marketing laws, nothing will change.
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Andy is a corporate governance expert and Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, in The University of Wollongong, admitted as an Australian Legal Practitioner in the Supreme Court of Victoria, an Advocate of the High Court of South Africa, and the Principal of Clarity Prudential Regulatory Consulting.