TAB pays $2.7 million for spam and telemarketing breaches, its second ACMA hit in two years

The Australian Communications and Media Authority has hit TAB with penalties totalling more than $2.7 million for breaches of Australia's spam and telemarketing laws, as reported by AdNews. Between February 2024 and June 2025, TAB made 351 telemarketing calls to numbers on the Do Not Call Register without consent, 82 calls outside permitted hours, and close to 4,000 calls in which it failed to properly identify itself or the purpose of the call.

The ACMA also acted on marketing messages sent after customers opted out. TAB self-reported in 2025 that it had sent more than 217,000 marketing emails and SMS over a 16-day period to customers who had unsubscribed from those channels. Under the Spam Act, unsubscribe requests must be honoured within five business days.

The penalty comes with a court-enforceable undertaking. TAB must commission an independent review of its telemarketing systems and provide regular compliance reports to the regulator. That layer of ongoing scrutiny matters as much as the dollar figure, because it puts the company's marketing operations under external supervision.

This is not TAB's first time in the ACMA's sights. In 2024 the company paid more than $4 million for non-compliant SMS and WhatsApp messages sent to VIP customers, one of the larger spam penalties issued in Australia at the time. A second breach within two years suggests the earlier remediation did not fully fix consent and suppression handling across TAB's channels.

Why it matters for Australian marketers: the ACMA has spent the past three years making examples of big consumer brands, with banks, retailers and wagering companies all fined for consent and unsubscribe failures. The recurring pattern is rarely malice, it is CRM plumbing. Suppression lists that do not sync across channels, unsubscribes that lag past the five-day window, and outbound call lists that miss the Do Not Call wash. Marketing teams running lifecycle programs at scale should treat this penalty as a prompt to audit their own consent flows, because self-reporting after the fact, as TAB did, no longer buys much leniency.

Sources: acma.gov.au, adnews.com.au