CRTC fines Compu-Finder $1.1 million for CASL violations

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is the principle agency tasked with enforcing Canada’s anti-spam law. Today they issued a Notice of Violation to Compu-Finder  including a $1.1 million dollar fine for 4 violations of CASL. The violations include sending unsolicited email and having a non-working unsubscribe link. According to the CRTC, complaints about Compu-Finder accounted for 26% of all complaints submitted about this industry sector.
This is the first major fine announced under CASL.
One of the first things that jumped out at me about this is the action was taken against B2B mail. There are a lot of senders out there who think nothing of sending unsolicited emails to business addresses. In my experience, many B2B senders think permission is much less important for them than B2C senders. I think that this enforcement action demonstrates that, at least to the CRTC, permission is required for B2B mail.
The other thing that jumped out is that given the extent of the complaints (26%) the financial penalties were only slightly more than 10% of the $10M maximum penalty. It seems the CRTC is not blindly applying the maximum penalty, but is instead actually applying some discretion to the fines.
I’ve looked for the actual notice of violation, but haven’t been able to find a copy. If I find it, I will share.
 
 
 
 

Related Posts

CASL enforcement

As most people know, the Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL) went into effect July 1 of this year. This month, the CRTC concluded its first investigation.

Read More

Canadian Anti-Spam Law

A few years ago, Canada passed an anti-spam law (CASL). In the time since then, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commissions (CRTC) have been working to establish the regulations to implement the law. Those regulations appear to have been published recently. Matt Vernhout, a email expert and Canadian citizen, published a link to the regulations and a summary of the rules.
There still doesn’t seem to be a firm date for when CASL will be enforced law. Matt says he’s hearing that the date will be around October. We’ll see if it slips from that.
 

Read More

Language as filtering criteria

A few months ago I was working on a delivery audit for a client who sends mail in multiple languages. We discovered that the language of an email has a significant delivery impact. The same email in different languages was delivered differently, particularly at Gmail. Emails in a language I don’t normally receive email in were delivered to my bulk folder.
Other folks have commented on similar things. Some filters really do look at preferred language of the recipient and treat mail in other languages as problematic. I don’t think that’s unreasonable. I do get a lot of foreign language spam and there’s no real way to stop it. Many countries don’t require opt-out links, and so there isn’t a clear way to even unsubscribe.
Writing in the recipient’s local language is one way to minimize inappropriate blocking, even when you have permission to send mail.
 
 

Read More