Payday lenders Yes Card and Fone Funds will be subject to enquiries from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) over the alleged use of spam texts in marketing strategies.
Prospective customers are believed to have received unsolicited messages containing links to websites owned by both companies, with missives from the firms being among the top twenty most common forms of text spam reported to the ICO during January.
A spokesman from the ICO said: "We have noted for some time the number of messages relating to payday loans and routinely discuss the threats posed by unsolicited marketing messages with the [Financial Conduct Authority], sharing intelligence to support the work of each other in this area."
Neither Yes Card or Fone Funds could be reached for comment.
Payday lending was the most common theme in text message spam during the last quarter of 2014, according to the ICO, accounting for more than a quarter of incidents reported to the office.
Information passed to CBR by the security vendor Cloudmark showed dozens of web domains owned by payday loan companies had been linked to in spam text messages, including Yes Card, Fone Funds and several of their rivals.
The ICO spokesman said the office would log the other URLs linked to spam campaigns, and "continue to investigate companies sending unsolicited marketing messages…focusing on those organisation where we receive the most complaints".
A report from Cloudmark also corroborated the ICO’s findings, with payday loan spam accounting for almost half of total text spam during the last year.
Andrew Conway, security researcher at the vendor, said: "Despite all the publicity about what a pernicious business [payday lending] is, we are still seeing a lot of activity in this area."
He added that the continuance of the trend meant that there was still money to be made, and that a company looking to distribute spam could operate through an affiliate programme to obscure the link between itself and the spammers.
