General Data Protection Regulation GDPR

The sneaky ways round GDPR have already begun

Steve Procter, SMS Expert, 7th Mar 2018

I received an unsolicited email the other day offering me 200,000 UK mobile numbers and 5 million emails.

As a leading SMS marketing provider this is nothing new. A day hardly goes by without people thinking I want to buy lists of numbers - I don't!

But this one was a bit sneaky and claimed to offer a way round the forthcoming GDPR.

In a nutshell the guy (lets call him Dodgy Dave) was offering to sell me the company. The entire incorporated Limited Company. It was a shell with nothing else left in it. But because it was the actual company that he claimed had originally been used when all those users signed up to received his "marketing", Dave felt that it was perfectly legitimate for me to buy the company. And technically I would be buying the rights to "market" to those people and to process their data as I wished.

I am no lawyer so I really don't know if this is legal or not. But it certainly doesn't smell very nice.

With 2 months still to go before GDPR, I guess we already need to start watching out for how the Dodgy Dave's of the world start plying their wares whilst claiming to be GDPR-compliant.

As I am always saying to clients about SMS marketing and communications ... it's not about spray-and-pray to bought-in lists. So there is only one answer for people like Dave - "thanks but no thanks".    

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