The collapse of a UK spam empire

A Horsham loan-marketing operation fired adverts at hundreds of thousands of phone numbers a day. It was fined, it folded, and the fine was never paid.

For more than a year, a company registered to a residential road in Horsham sat at the centre of one of Britain’s busiest unlawful texting operations, and it never sent a single message itself.

ESL Consultancy Services Ltd paid someone else to do that, an affiliate capable of pushing high-interest loan adverts to as many as 546,000 phone numbers a day.

On Tuesday (2 June) its director, Leanne Richardson, was banned from running a company for six years. The £200,000 fine her firm was handed for the scheme has still not been paid, and on the present evidence it never will be.

SL was fined £200,000 in December 2024 and went into liquidation the following May without surrendering a penny of it. The ban is what the system reaches for once the money has already gone, and in nuisance marketing, that is closer to the rule than the exception.

How the operation worked

Richardson, 44, was the named director of ESL, which used its texts to promote loans to people who had never agreed to hear from it.

The sending was outsourced to Daniel Bentley and his company Taipan Trading Ltd, which the regulator found had fired off more than 2.5 million unsolicited marketing messages across 2022 and 2023.

Between September 2022 and December 2023 the campaign generated 37,961 complaints to the 7726 spam reporting service, with a further 16 made directly to the regulator.

The operation was built to stay hidden. ESL used unregistered SIM cards to obscure who was behind the messages, and investigators found it had doctored Taipan’s due diligence form before sending it to the Financial Conduct Authority, stripping out detail that would have looked unfavourable.

The Insolvency Service’s Simon Gillett described Richardson and her company as the driving force behind the scheme, even though they had not physically sent the texts. The regulator’s Andy Curry said ESL knew the law and chose to ignore it for financial gain.

Why the fine was never going to land

The collapse of ESL follows a pattern regulators have struggled with for a decade.

A Freedom of Information analysis of fines issued since 2015 found that around 30% remained unpaid, worth more than £7 million, and that just under a quarter of nuisance call penalties had actually been collected. The mechanism is simple.

A company is fined, the directors put it into liquidation, and the debt dies with the business. The record case makes the point: Keurboom Communications was fined £400,000 in 2017 over 99.5 million automated calls and was already in liquidation by the time the penalty was announced.

A 2018 law change was meant to close that door, allowing directors to be made personally liable up to £500,000 so they could no longer hide behind a folded company.

ESL shows how far short that has fallen in practice. The fine still evaporated, and the only sanction that survived was the disqualification, the route through which the regulator has now helped ban dozens of directors since 2017.

Richardson’s six-year ban began on Tuesday under an undertaking accepted by the Secretary of State for Business and Trade. It bars her from forming, promoting or managing a company without the court’s permission.

What it does not do is recover the £200,000, or the cost of the distress those messages caused.

For the people who reported them, the empire’s collapse is the only penalty that ever really took effect.

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