Sydney (AFP) – Embattled Australian telco giant Optus was hit with a $66 million fine on Wednesday over “appalling” sales conduct as the firm grapples with fallout from a network outage linked to several deaths. A federal court ruled the company — one of Australia’s top telecoms providers — should be punished for selling products to vulnerable customers between 2019 and 2023 that they did not need or want, leaving many in debt. Many of these people were also Indigenous and lived in remote parts of the country. Federal Court’s Justice Patrick O’Sullivan labelled the company’s conduct as “extremely serious” and “appalling.”
Consumers incurred thousands of dollars of debt while on modest incomes and became embarrassed or stressed over how they would pay these, he added. The court formally approved the penalty Wednesday, which Optus and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission had agreed to in June. Optus previously described its sales practices during the offending period as “unconscionable conduct and inappropriate.”
Following the ruling, Optus said it had changed its sales practices to better support customers. “Optus is remediating impacted customers as a matter of priority,” the company said. It will also donate $662,300 to improve the financial literacy of Indigenous communities.
Wednesday’s fine comes just days after an outage impacted 600 people across South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory for at least ten hours. The outage prevented calls to emergency services, with four deaths now linked to the outage. On Wednesday, Optus announced details of an independent review that will probe the series of events that took place and determine why emergency calls did not connect.
“There are no words that can express how sorry I am about the very sad loss of the lives of four people, who could not reach emergency services in their time of need,” chief executive Stephen Rue said. Optus was previously fined $7.9 million after an outage halted its mobile and internet systems for nearly 12 hours in 2023.
© 2024 AFP
