One of Australia’s major financial services providers has been handed a substantial eight-figure penalty for persistent violations of the nation’s spam marketing regulations, marking the second time in as many years the firm has been punished for identical misconduct. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), the country’s independent communications regulator, announced this week that Latitude Finance Australia will pay $3.96 million in penalties after an investigation uncovered more than 2.7 million breaches of Australian spam legislation.
Of the millions of unauthorized and non-compliant marketing messages distributed by the firm, more than 2.3 million failed to include accurate contact information for the company as required by law. Additionally, 344,416 of these commercial messages lacked a working unsubscribe mechanism that would allow recipients to opt out of future communications, according to ACMA’s official findings. Most of the non-compliant messages were sent to promote Latitude’s line of credit card products and other consumer financial services. While many messages instructed users to reply with the word ‘STOP’ to opt out of future mailings, the regulator confirmed that a large share of these requests were never processed correctly due to broken systems.
Samantha York, a sitting member of the ACMA authority, emphasized that the size of the penalty was directly tied to both the staggering scale of the violations and the fact that this is a repeat offense. Back in 2022, Latitude was already ordered to pay $1.55 million in penalties for nearly identical spam law breaches. “Latitude is now a two-time offender and it is disappointing that it let consumers down again,” York said in a formal statement. “The spam laws have been in place for more than 20 years, there is simply no excuse for ongoing noncompliance, particularly after previous enforcement action. Given Latitude’s history of noncompliance, we will be very closely monitoring how it meets its obligations going forward.”
In an official disclosure filed with the Australian Stock Exchange on Wednesday morning, Latitude acknowledged the regulator’s findings and the imposed penalty. The company noted that as soon as internal teams identified that it had sent potentially non-compliant SMS marketing messages, it self-reported the issue to ACMA and immediately moved to update and strengthen its internal spam compliance protocols. As part of an enforceable undertaking agreed to with the regulator, Latitude will now hire an independent third-party compliance expert to audit and verify that its updated processes meet all legal requirements moving forward.