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Vanquis Bank Limited, a subsidiary of Provident Financial Group, has been fined £75,000 after sending 870,849 spam text messages and 620,000 spam emails to promote its credit cards.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which issued the fine, said the Bradford-based bank had broken the law because the recipients had not consented to being sent the marketing messages.
It said Vanquis had obtained the marketing lists used to send the messages from other organisations, and "relied on indirect consent rather than checking itself that the correct level of consent had been obtained". The consent included non-specific, general wording, such as "trusted parties" and "carefully selected third parties".
Organisations cannot send marketing text messages or emails unless the recipient has directly consented to that specific company sending the messgage.
The ICO also issued a legal notice to Vanquis to ensure its practices comply with the law. The bank said it was "sorry for any irritation caused to the individuals concerned."
ICO’s head of enforcement Steve Eckersley said: “There are rules in place to protect people from the irritation, and in some cases anxiety and distress, spam texts and emails cause.
“People need to be properly informed about what they are consenting to. Telling them their details could be passed to ‘similar organisations’ or ‘selected third parties’ cannot be relied upon as specific consent.”
MrEckersley added that people were so "exasperated" by the messages that they were left with little choice but to complain to the public body, prompting it to open an investigation.
Vanquis’s parent company Provident Financial suffered a huge setback last month when £1.7bn was wiped off its value and shares plunged 68pc as investors digested a profit warning from the company, as well as the shock departure of its chief executive and a scrapped dividend.
Its market capitalisation fell from around £2.58bn overnight to just £791m.
Provident warned that it could make losses of between £80m and £120m in its home credit business this year after it recently changed the way it collected loans.
That compares to a £60m profit forecast announced just three months ago, when the group alerted shareholders that profits in the division were expected to halve from £115m in 2016.
Provident Financial, a sub-prime lender, trades under a number of different brands, including Vanquis for its credit cards, Satsuma for its online loans, Glo for its guarantor loans and Moneybarn for its vehicle finance operations.
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