8 ms·
ICO fines HelloFresh £140k for spam texts and emails
- redder23 3y ago140k is less then what they made abusing I am sure, as usual companies just abuse and pay fines when they get caught.
- dave4420 3y agoLess than a fifth of a penny per spam message. This will not act as a deterrent.
- maccard 3y agoThis is the UK. The goal here is a slap on the wrist to tell them to not do it again, with the goal of compliance with the rules.
- djtango 3y agoYeah but a £5 charge per spam email would also ensure good compliance.
- asah 3y agoRegulators typically start with a small fine and then if the behavior continues, fines and penalties increase exponentially. Having worked inside a number of companies who've received fines, the ones that intend to continue operating change their behavior immediately and install controls to avoid this escalation path. The obvious exception is when the behavior change creates an existential threat to the core business model, i.e. the company literally cannot change its behavior.
- plagiarist 3y agoBut we could have an actually punitive first fine to deter other companies from trying their luck at ignoring the law.
- kevincox 3y agoThis just incentivizes companies to do this behaviour until their first warning. If you want companies to follow the rules from the get-go you better make sure that your first fine makes them regret ignoring the rules. If you make the incentives to ignore the rules until they get caught the first time then companies will do that. HelloFresh got huge numbers of subscribers based on this strategy for pennies. Even if they stop now the next competitor will do the same thing until they get the first fine. It's like saying that your first murder should just result in a warning or a token fine. This basically gives everyone one "free" murder and it would be a waste not to use it. (Moral issues aside of course)
- asah 3y agoAgreed, i.e. * IF * we want companies to follow the rules... but so far, society (certainly American society...) does not seem to actually want companies to always follow the rules... sigh...
- jamescun 3y agoThe ICO has always been a bit of a wet blanket. Never really uses its powers effectively. From pathetic fines to putting out press releases about raids before they happen. £140k is just the cost of doing business with 79 million spam emails and 1 million spam texts.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dmw_ng 3y ago> putting out press releases about raids before they happen This sounds like a Chris Morris sketch, got a link to share? edit: I think it's referring to the Cambridge Analytica scandal
- Towaway69 3y agoMany companies just factor fines and legal costs into the bottom line. HelloFresh might well have known they are overdoing it but just put some money aside to pay the fine - when it then comes.
- switch007 3y agoAmazing result for Hello Fresh. What a bargain. The article is a pro business advert. The ICO is a joke and only exists so the Government can pretend there is regulation and oversight
- aa_is_op 3y agoWeird take since the ICO has been about the only major privacy watchdog outside the EU to fine these companies. The EU is literally the last bastion of consumer protection rights.
- idonotknowwhy 3y agoACCC (Australia) issues fines too. I think we've fined Kogan a few times.
- brandall10 3y agoI think parent is saying the exceptionally low fine sets a bad precedent for this being a slap on the wrist offense - that it would be better if no action were taken to at least give an aura of potential accountability for other bad actors.
- switch007 3y agoDid you reply to the right comment? Who mentioned the EU? What do consumer protection rights have to do with the article or my comment? Consumer protection rights are about good and services, not data privacy.
- WhackyIdeas 3y agoI don’t think so, not for me at least… because any time I hear their name I’m going to remember what the ICO says, especially when we ourselves take time to ensure our own checkout is fair. £140,000 is a slap on the wrist so I am sure they will learn a valuable lesson to respect customers a bit more.
- chaoz_ 3y agoSounds like it's still an acceptable cost of doing business.
- londons_explore 3y agoIt's a first-time fine. It goes up roughly 10x if they do it again.
- PUSH_AX 3y agoI am a recipient of their sms spam and I don’t remember there being a way to opt out, also I think the number rotated so blocking was ineffective. Glad to see some consequences, even if it’s pocket change today.
- thfuran 3y agoIt's not consequential. Less than £0.002 per message is a joke.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoHelloFresh also sends marketing snail mail if they have your postal address. The market starts to be crowded and they are obviously aggressively marketing their product. We'll see if that can last. It's crazy that they got $367 million in total funding for a recipe and ingredients (meal kits) subscription business but they apparently now have 6 billion euros in revenue so it seems to work.
- VBprogrammer 3y agoThe service is really good. But very little to differentiate it from any of the other services with the result that when we used it we just swapped between whichever service give us a discounted offer. We could keep it up for months on end without paying the full subscription price.
- kevincox 3y agoThe worst part is that (at least in Canada) this isn't illegal. Unsolicited calls, texts and email are illegal but snail mail is fine. It seems that all form of communication should have the same rules, but the laws are special cases. Probably if they start messaging you via WhatsApp that is also fine.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoI don't know about Canada, but in the US, the postal system is subsidized by spam. Essentially spam is the most profitable aspect of the service, and so it's endorsed at the expense of everything else. Since the sender pays costs for postal mail, it's completely different than SMS or emails.
- kevincox 3y agoI'd rather pay a tiny bit more taxes than print and mail spam only to be thrown out without being read. Then shipped to the recycler. What a waste of resources and my time.
- ghaff 3y ago
- londons_explore 3y ago> As part of this investigation, it was also discovered that the company continued to contact some individuals even after they had requested this to stop. If the messages had an opt-out mechanism that worked, they likely would have gotten away with the other things.
- switch007 3y agoIt’s funny how the opt out mechanisms are the buggiest part of all the systems in a company. And the slowest. I had a message the other day: “We will try our best to unsubscribe you within 30 days”. Well, don’t strain yourselves
- nmstoker 3y agoYes, all these "it'll take X days to remove this" responses are an excuse. These things should be automatic. Moonpig won't stop reminding me of the upcoming birthday of someone who has died - I have to wait 2 weeks for something which is painful.
- stavros 3y agoWhat, you think a database can just, like, delete a row, just like that? Don't be ridiculous.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago"Hi there, my name is Little Bobby Tables! Opt out of THIS!"
- londons_explore 3y agoI think it's because some emails might have already been sent and be sitting in the outbound mail queues of various mail servers. Some of those might retry for up to 14 days. Hence, 14 days to be sure you won't get any more emails.
- switch007 3y ago
- tux3 3y agoICO's pricing of spam doesn't seem very well thought out. For one, there's a lack of enforcement on this tax. Many customers get away with sending spam while evading payment. ICO is in the business of selling forgiveness, so they need to catch people. Then the pricing structure is strange. In a given time period, spam can be taxed up to a maximum of 500k, but there is no limit on the amount of spam you are allowed to send. This benefits larger players, as long as your spam operation scales profitably beyond the fixed cap of the tax's pricing structure.
- Havoc 3y agoHelloFresh seems to be optimising for user count above all else (incl profit). They keep offering their big -40% loss leader promos to people that cancelled. Must be costing them an ungodly amount.
- iinnPP 3y agoThere's no way they are losing money at 40% off unless they are doing something unreasonably bad.
- michaelt 3y agoI've never used a meal kit delivery company but isn't the grocery market extremely cost-competitive? Retailers like wal-mart only make about a 3% profit margin. And that's with the customer taking on the picking, packing and delivery. Are meal kit companies really charging twice retail for the things they supply?
- Havoc 3y agoThey have single digit operating margin so yeah they're absolutely losing money on -40% offers. https://companiesmarketcap.com/hellofresh/operating-margin/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/hellofresh/operating-margin/
- sph 3y agoThat's the venture capital grow-at-all-costs-so-we-can-exit model pretty much all startups want to go for. You know what else grows unchecked until it has consumed all resources of its host?
- shawnz 3y ago> You know what else grows unchecked until it has consumed all resources of its host? Every living thing which has an evolutionary advantage over its competitors
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- philipwhiuk 3y ago> Grocery Delivery E-Services UK Limited Very transparent
- jonatron 3y agoTheir other brand is Green Chef
- JeffSnazz 3y agoMan I wish no private corp was allowed to contact you without an opt-in. Would really make email useful again....
- sph 3y agoYesterday I created an account on John Lewis' website, and I was please to see that during sign-up, they had an unchecked "Tick here if you want our newsletter." Then, later I placed an order, and during credit card checks I noticed a "Tick here if you do NOT want our newsletter", which was of course unchecked and that's how the fuckers got me. Fuck this dark pattern, and fuck the Product Manager that requested it. There literally should be a law that says you cannot ask a user to check a box NOT to give away their data.
- Gigachad 3y agoI just mark all marketing emails as spam now. Since I never want them, I can't have opted in to it so it's spam. Seems very effective at having my email provider forward all future emails from them to spam and hopefully tarnishes their sender trust rating a little.
- tonyedgecombe 3y agoThe trouble is you may end up with transactional emails in your spam folder.
- Avamander 3y agoMakes their service worse for everyone, everyone wins if they get used less.
- Silhouette 3y agoIndeed. If someone is going to argue credibly for treating everything from commercial sources as spam then they also need to explain how businesses can provide any information they are actively required to provide to their customers either by law or by whatever method the customer is using to pay them. In general the merchants have no say in this and the penalties for failing to provide the information can be far more severe than anything they're going to suffer for losing a few people who don't understand what spam is and abuse the mark-as-spam button when reading their mail.
- pyeri 3y agoAs someone who is stressed by all the spam emails, texts, whatsapps and robo calls in my digital life, I appreciate this news a lot. Great going Mr. Sunak, keep giving them more fines until this "spam business" becomes unprofitable!
- a_dabbler 3y agoKind of strange to attribute this to Sunak, he has nothing to do with it
- j4yav 3y agoIt seems like they are basically selling papal indulgences on the cheap? Who gets the revenue they generate from absolving these companies of their sins?
- Snow_Falls 3y agoThat's a fantastic way of describing it. I will be using that from now on.
- soneca 3y agoGood opportunity to repost how HelloFresh is a scammy company. I got tricked into a very dark-patterned coffee subscription company called Amora Coffee. I got one of their coupon with a Hello Fresh box. Which, by association, at the time increased my trust in this Amora Coffee company. And now, after being scammed, only ruined my trust in the Hello Fresh company. Never bought it again, never will, and will tell everyone who asks not to buy. I will try to list all the dark patterns that I remember but you can google "Amora Coffee scam". First, they present themselves as a regular e-commerce selling coffee. They offer a coupon for a free first purchase. The site seems legit enough and they only ask you to pay $1 for delivery fee. It seems a great deal, even if the coffee is not that good, worth trying it. You even think that they must have a really good product to offer a free full-sized sample. Their conversion rate must be phenomenal at this step. But in that step alone there are two parts of the scam already. You realize them only after you paid. In the receipt, if you took the time to read it and pay attention (how often do people really read the receipt of what they just purchased?), you learn that you just signed up to a subscription!! You are not just buying one bag, you are paying a subscription and, unless you cancel, you will be charged full price soon enough. The $1 dollar fee is that they need your credit card to be able to charge you the recurrent fee before you know it is a scam (you will know soon enough). They probably charge $1 just to avoid trouble with the credit card companies (they will have a first legitime, undisputed payment after all). The subscription itself is another step of the scam. You pay every two weeks, not every month as it's the common practice. Also, they claim that to not be charged, you have to cancel the next delivery before it has shipped. In practice, it all means that you have to cancel the subscription (that you never knew you had signed up to) in a week, which is even before the first "free" delivery has arrived. So, I was savvy enough to get the scam in time by reading the receipt and googling "Amora Coffee scam". So, I just would cancel immediately. How do you cancel? You have to go to their site, log in into your account and cancel there. Ok, the scammers have not given up stealing my money just yet. To my surprise, the email I used to make the first purchase is not my username to log into their site. I have yet to create an account. To do that I have to input my email and a numerical code that is hidden in the receipt that I got. It is there, but you have to find it with no help at all. Did I just jumped all the obstacles that the thieves were putting in front of me? No! The "create your account" form just didn't work!! Looking on online reviews you notice that that form is not working for over an year!! It is impossible to cancel your subscription. So I find a email, send a very straightforward message telling them to cancel. So I have not being charged. Apparently I avoided the scam. Still, they got that first $1 of mine from the initial purchase. Probably what they bribed Hello Fresh with to steal from their customers.
- justinl33 3y agoIsn’t this a bit of an ‘oh no… anyways’ moment for HelloFresh? The delivery cost of the ads (spam) themselves was probably a factor of 10 greater; considering they sent literally 80 million emails
- bennyp101 3y agoWe tried them towards the end of last year, but compared to Gousto, found the quality and recipes lacking. Then there were the weird free things in the box, some Nivea face cream in one of them… very strange. I guess they must be making enough from cutting back and 3rd party deals to not worry about the slap on the wrist
- jmacd 3y agoFunny, I subscribed to HelloFresh for a few months and I get TXTs from them a few times a month now. I try to unsubscribe and report/ban the number every time but they just send a message from another number the next time. Really frustrating.
- redder23 3y ago[flagged]
- drbaba 3y ago> Why would you continue to subscribe to a bullshit company that does this? They said they subscribed which could mean that they have since unsubscribed. I think they’re texting them because they want them back as a customer - it makes no sense to pester your currently paying customers.
- gryzzly 3y agoI’m in process of fighting Hellofresh for still sending my family personalised "reactivation" spam even though we requested full private data removal per GDPR. I’d be glad to report it to the respective institution in Germany.
- d1m 3y agorobust indeed
- jdietrich 3y agoThere seems to be a lot of anti-ICO rhetoric in the comments, which I don't think is entirely fair. Reading the enforcement notice, it seems that the ICO were satisfied that the breach was negligent rather than intentional. HelloFresh have fully complied with the investigation and taken steps to remedy the breach. Bearing in mind that the ICO's remit is to ensure compliance rather than dole out punishment, this seems broadly reasonable. I'm quite confident that HelloFresh understand that a) they're being watched and b) the ICO won't be nearly so lenient if HelloFresh come to their attention again. I know that people get very angry about spam, but a huge fine that would "guarantee deterrence" would rightly be challenged in court as disproportionate. https://ico.org.uk/media/action-weve-taken/mpns/4027967/hello-fresh-mpn-20240110.pdf https://ico.org.uk/media/action-weve-taken/mpns/4027967/hell...
- rimeice 3y agoAgree, not sure it’s helpful for a regulator to bankrupt a business for sending too many emails. Spam email is pretty par for the course nowadays. This seems like a proportionate response to alert them to get a handle on it.
- kevincox 3y agoI'm not saying that bankrupting businesses is the best strategy, but it can be helpful. If you put fear into these companies that they can get wiped out at a moments notice they will smarten up really quick. If you show them that they will get a fairly cheap slap-on-the-wrist warning first they will ignore the rules until they get the first warning, then toe the line. So if you want the whole industry to follow the rules without investigating and fining each one-by-one you better make sure that your first action against them makes them regret their choices.
- jacquesm 3y agoThere are far worse entities than HelloFresh that are still alive as of today and given that the ICO is trying hard to get parties to comply it is kind of logical that they take an individual approach to each case. That said I think 140K is too low.
- matthews2 3y agoI receive a lot of physical mail from HelloFresh and there's no clear way to opt-out. I've never (willingly or knowingly) signed up to their service or any marketing bits.
- Geezus_42 3y agoI've been getting tons of physical mail I didn't ask for for years. We need a spam filter for the USPS. I only check my mailbox when I know something I want is coming, or if I need some grocery ads for kindling, because it's all garbage. It drives me insane how wasteful it is, chopping down trees just to make mailers that noone wants.
- sphars 3y agoIt doesn't help with the spam but if you sign up with USPS's Informed Delivery, you can at least see if you're getting anything that day. Which can at least save you trips on collecting your mail until you receive something you care about.
- CamelCaseName 3y agoI don't think you can opt out of this kind of advertising, and it's important that people en masse don't, because it subsidizes the entire mail system.
- ukoki 3y agoWhat we really need is an email address like <my address>@usps.com and all physical mail that isn’t from a registered law firm or government institution to be rejected because I’ve “opted-in to electronic physical mail”. Emails to that address would be forwarded to the personal email addresses of household members based on the named recipient. And sending those emails should cost the same as a stamp. Would help cut down on the massive amount of waste that is physical spam and help generate profit for the postal service
- technothrasher 3y agoI literally gave up on having a mailbox because of physical mail spam. I realized that they don't deliver mass mail to business addresses, and so I took down my mailbox and now just have all my mail sent to my work address. I've been doing it for ten years now, and it works, but it does lead to weirdness occasionally. Most often I encounter people who actually get angry at me for not having a mailbox, call me selfish, call me the unibomber, tell me it is illegal. I still cannot figure out why people get emotionally charged about it. A short while after I did it, the USPS reported to HUD that my address was vacant, and HUD reported that to the bank that holds my mortgage. This of course freaked them out until I explained to them what was going on. I was also unable to take advantage of the free Covid test kits that the Federal government said were available to "every family in America". Turns out it was really every family in America with a residential mailbox. Ok, that was my choice, but there *are* still rural communities that rely on general delivery at the post office rather than individual mailboxes. I do occasionally hit companies who's web app will tell me my address isn't good because it is a business address instead of a residential address. They are few enough though that I can just not do business with them and it hasn't impacted me much.
- WhackyIdeas 3y agoWe have never signed up to HelloFresh but they have sent us mail through the post!
- dmaa 3y agoThe worst about Hello Fresh is the subscription itself, you get meals every week, unless you opt-out. Of course that you will forget to opt out at some point, so they just send you 3 meals of their choice. No 'Hey, we will send you this, are you ok with it or do you want to change it?' Plus, the receipes aren't that good if you are an above average cook. You get something Indian and it is a gringo version of the real thing, even if the real thing is easy to do. Or, there is a mistake in the recipe, such as an ingredient not appearing in the walkthrough. I subscribe to stuff like this so that I can cook without using my brain after being tired, not having to check meticulously every dish. After two months, I happily unsubscribed. The scammyness aside, I do not see any advantage in using the service for how much it costs.
- enlyth 3y agoI tried Hello Fresh because of their "free" box promotion, and I have to say as a single person who lives alone, it was great to both have sensible portion sizes, and reducing the mental overhead of having to think about what to cook during weekdays, along the planning and shopping that comes with it. It's nice not to have to eat Bolognese for 4 days if you make one, since beef mince normally only comes in 500g sizes and so on. I know you can freeze it, but you get my point. That being said, I agree with the others that the recipes are quite simple, and once you know them it becomes just as easy to buy the ingredients at the shop and make it yourself. Another disadvantage I've noticed is the amount of packaging, it can't be environmentally friendly. They ship perishables wrapped inside mineral wool with a non-recyclable plastic bag with ice, everything is in a huge cardboard box, there's tons of printed recipes and promotional codes printed on cards, and tons and tons of little plastic and paper wrappers for everything.
- dmaa 3y agoOh yes, I forgot about the packaging! It's insane, and also quite a bit of an overhead to dispose of it properly (where I live).
- Snow_Falls 3y agoNot buying in bulk is always going to have more packaging. I bet the excessive amount is to prevent customer complaints about ruined ingredients.
- k8sToGo 3y agoThey are the worst. I signed up once for trial and decided to cancel it. They kept sending me postal mail, sms, phone calls, and emails.
- ijhuygft776 3y agoHelloFresh is nice, until you actually have to pay for it... (the trial period is priced reasonably)
- isoprophlex 3y ago.17 cent per message. What a bargain.
- fnord77 3y agominor business expense
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- javidlakha 3y agoOne week before the first lockdown - when most offices had sent their staff home - HelloFresh were knocking door to door on my street to flog subscriptions, not minding that they might have been spreading the virus.
- reaperducer 3y agoThis must be fake news. We have been reassured hundreds of times by vocal HN posters that spam text messages are strictly an American problem, and that it never ever happens in the "civilized" world.
- whamlastxmas 3y agoI spent 25 minutes trying to cancel my hello fresh subscription but it pretended like it couldn’t find my account and customer service was useless. I thankfully used a burner virtual credit card and just disabled the card, but they attempted and failed to charge the card three times a week for months before giving up. Scummy company
- delecti 3y agoOn the other anecdote, my wife was able to cancel online as soon as we made the decision to do so.