Glasgow businessman of firm which made 1.6m nuisance calls a day banned from being director

The former boss of a nuisance cold-call firm has been banned from running companies for eight years after his company caused a nightmare for millions of people.

Homeowners were inundated with cold calls, with more than 1.6m calls made a day - and Duncan Paul, a former director of Clydebank-based firm CRDNN Limited, allowed staff to make the lives of those on the other end of the line miserable.

The company made millions of automated sales calls within a four-month period by targeting homes and businesses in 2018. The 51-year-old resigned from the West Dunbartonshire business which went into liquidation in 2021.

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A maximum fine of £500,000 was imposed by the Information Commissioner's Office in 2020 but it went unpaid.

Paul, of the East Dunbartonshire village of Balmore, on the outskirts of Glasgow, has now been disqualified from acting as a company director for eight years, the Daily Record reports.

His co-director, 44-year-old Stephen Foote, of the Glasgow suburb of Newton Mearns, East Renfrewshire, was also banned as a director for eight years in January 2023.

Mike Smith, Chief Investigator at the Insolvency Service, said: "Duncan Paul's company plagued homes and businesses with nuisance cold-calls, disrupting the lives of millions of people.

"The calls were persistent, totally unsolicited, and to add to people’s frustration, they received further calls when they attempted to opt-out of receiving them.

"Paul and Foote were the directors of this firm and we have taken robust action to prevent them each from running or managing any company for eight years."

The Record previously told of how Paul had been slammed for flaunting supercars in the midst of the scandal. He drove a string of luxury cars while running the nuisance call empire – including an Aston Martin, Range Rover and a white McLaren supercar.

More than 63 million automated calls CRDNN made from June to the start of October 2018 connected, and The Information Commissioner's Office received almost 3,000 complaints from people during that period via its online reporting tool.

Many of the calls were about window scrappage, debt management, window, conservatory and boiler sales.

Others falsely claimed to be working with Scottish and UK government energy saving schemes. In one case, calls made to a Network Rail control centre near Fort William clogged up the line, creating potential safety problems.

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A further 411 complaints were received via the online reporting tool of the Telephone Preference Service. CRDNN provided no evidence that recipients had given their consent to receive the calls.

Trevor Callaghan, the ICO’s Director of Enforcement and Investigations, added: "The directors of CRDNN knowingly operated their business with a complete disregard for not only the law but also public safety.

"They harassed millions of people, causing disruption, annoyance and distress and recklessly affected important services potentially putting the wider public in danger. That’s why their conduct called for the maximum fine possible under the law.

"The ICO is committed to building strong partnerships with other agencies, including the Insolvency Service, to ensure our work has long term, tangible impact.

"Disrupting the activities of these rogue companies and their directors ensures they can’t easily resurface under a different name and continue to cause further harm to people."

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