UK Financial firm rapped on the knuckles for social SMS spam

There was some hubbub in the UK last week about the Advertising Standards Authority rapping the knuckles of First Financial (UK) Ltd who are trading as FirstPayDayLoanUk.  It's time we dished the dirt on what's really going on and why the ASA could well be wasting their time, and when the humble Brit would be better off if they coordinated with the other agencies involved in consumer protection. The truth is that these companies only exist to market financial products for offshore financial product affiliate schemes. They are setup with the proper licensing paperwork for not much more than the cost of a couple of affiliate payments. The issue with this text is that advertising payday loans as an acceptable method of funding social activities is blatently irresponsible lending. There is no opt-out and the informal greeting is misleading. By not identify themselves as marketing communications, the messages violate the CAP code. All three areas for complaint were upheld by the ASA.

Action The ads should not appear again in their current form. We told First Financial and Akklaim Telecoms to ensure text message ads were clearly identifiable as marketing communications and were only sent to those who had given explicit consent to receive them. We also told them to ensure ads did not imply that payday loans were suitable for spending on a social life. [ full details ]

The ASA had 13 complaints about the company. 13, Really?... Thousands of people reported First Pay Day Loan spam to the 7726 SMS spam reporting service in February this year, Paddy Payday Loans in March, Teletext Loans in April, and as it turns out they are all the same company with a bunch of different trading names. Again I wonder why the OFT or ICO appear to not be involved to protect their interests in this action.  All of the websites noted as trading as entities have whois records that point to addresses in the USA or Hong Kong.  Somebody is deliberately hiding in the shadows and I have to wonder why the OFT allows this type of covert and potentially deceptive representation but I'll save that discussion for another time too. The address given by First Financial (UK) Ltd is 145–157 St John Street, London, WC1V 4PW  and this is the home of a couple of virtual office companies http://www.londonpresence.com/ and http://www.companiesmadesimple.com/, but that is not a dead end. In the UK you are supposed to have a Consumer credit license to hock payday loans, and these are public. Companies House notes the company number is 08321666, a quick search on the OFT's website of public records reveals:

Could this be the principal place of business? http://goo.gl/maps/2WsSU (note the number 3 on the building 2 doors down). Classy digs. So, Mr Hamed Shabani has his paperwork in order with the OFT and can run a loans website himself. If you peel back the layers of these obviously templated websites you find the javascript for the affiliate program behind this and many other similar sites references t3leads [dot] com. They are well known to operate all sorts of programs in the financial sector that just happen to attract shady marketers. They drew the wrath of Andrew Penman last year for their involvement in SEO poisoning : http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/investigations/2012/10/the-hacking-web-involving-payd.html. The point here is that Mr Hamed Shabani isn't processing the credit application himself, he's running a templated website of T3leads affiliation with an entity called "ineedcash". What's really going on is that the T3leads affiliate program attracts payday loan marketeers with $110 (£75) incentives. Take a look at their marketing video for the full T3leads office tour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz3BhoqGpEA  Interestingly T3leads tout the ineedcash co uk website on their very own site too.

As you can clearly see from the screenshot below firstpaydayloanuk is exactly the same site with a logo swapped out.

T3 also reserve their marketing rights aggressively too in their privacy policy. You may also be interested to note the address at the bottom of their policy page, 145-147 St. John Street again. Coincidence? These companies constantly play a blame game that repeatedly crosses international borders, almost encouraging authorities to drop investigations. I'd love to see the authorities take some action against what others have called the "criminal network" in the US who repeatedly pay these shady marketers to send SMS spam and drive other shady traffic to their programs. I also found an interesting video of the whole international referral process http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_amcysqZNs#t=4m (Notice the employer field) We're about to get a Financial Conduct Authority in the UK to oversee the payday loan sector, please wish us better luck.