Action on spam and telemarketing: October to December 2019

Illegal solar telemarketing and lead generation are priorities this year. We have investigations underway and businesses are on notice that they must comply. We are starting to see a decrease in consumer complaints about solar telemarketing.

View our current compliance priorities.

We released our Combating Scams action plan in November 2019, and started trials of new scam disruption measures. We are working on new rules to make it harder for scammers to target Australians.

We consulted on new rules to prevent mobile number porting fraud. These are set to begin in April 2020.

We put out regular scam alerts through social media, including Facebook and Twitter.

View our investigations into spam and telemarketing.

We finished 10 investigations this quarter and have 4 investigations in progress.  We take 4 months on average to complete an investigation.

Find out more about our role in compliance and enforcement and the penalties for breaking the rules.

Finished investigations

Compliance alerts

We alert businesses about compliance issues raised in complaints. If the issues continue, we may investigate. One alert can include several issues.

Consumer complaints inform our actions and help us identify issues and trends.

• 38.5% of telemarketing and 16.6% of spam complaints were about scams
• the most common complaints were about solar, financial services and phone/internet services
• 36% of complaints about telemarketing did not contain enough details to identify the caller

Find out more about spam and telemarketing rules and what actions you can take.

Subscribe to our newsletters to get updates about our actions on telemarketing, spam and scams.

Access the data

Download the data for the charts in this report.

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Data files - Action on spam and telemarketing Oct to Dec 2019