Tabcorp’s TAB brand has paid more than A$2.7 million in penalties after Australia’s communications regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), found the wagering operator breached spam and telemarketing laws between February 2024 and June 2025. ACMA announced the action on 22 July 2026. It is the regulator’s second spam enforcement action against TAB in two years. The penalties followed an ACMA investigation into telemarketing calls made to VIP customers, and a separate self-report from TAB covering marketing emails and SMS sent to customers who had already unsubscribed from those channels.
What ACMA found
The telemarketing investigation identified three categories of breach. TAB made 351 calls to numbers listed on the Do Not Call Register without consent. It made 82 calls outside permitted hours. And it made nearly 4,000 calls without properly identifying itself as the caller, the purpose of the call, or both. All of the calls targeted VIP customers.
The spam component came from TAB itself. In 2025 the company self-reported that it had sent more than 217,000 marketing emails and SMS over a 16-day period to customers who had unsubscribed from specific marketing channels.
ACMA member Samantha Yorke said the breaches pointed to “serious weaknesses in TAB’s compliance systems” and warned the regulator would be watching closely.
The channel-level consent problem
The detail that matters most for email teams sits in ACMA’s own reasoning. In setting the spam penalty, the regulator took into account that the conduct was self-reported, was limited to a 16-day window, and involved customers who had withdrawn consent for a specific channel rather than opting out of all marketing.
That framing cuts both ways. ACMA treated the channel-specific nature of the opt-outs as a mitigating factor. But it still enforced. The message is that a customer who unsubscribes from email has unsubscribed from email, even if they remain opted in elsewhere. Preference centres that record channel-level choices but fail to enforce them at send time are a compliance liability, not a courtesy feature.
Global brands often centralise CRM preferences across markets and channels. This case shows what happens when orchestration between telemarketing, email, SMS, and customer-status segments breaks down. There is a deliverability cost too. A brand that keeps contacting people after opt-out trains recipients to distrust its legitimate mail and drives complaint rates up across every channel it uses.
A repeat offender, and a regulator keeping score
This is not TAB’s first encounter with ACMA. The regulator’s previous spam action against the company resulted in a penalty of more than A$4 million over non-compliant SMS and WhatsApp messages sent to VIP customers, a case we covered in our review of ACMA’s wagering enforcement.
Alongside the latest financial penalty, TAB has entered a court-enforceable undertaking requiring an independent review of its telemarketing systems, remedial improvements, and regular compliance reporting to ACMA. That undertaking sits on top of a separate spam undertaking already in force from the earlier action. As we noted when ACMA fined Latitude Finance A$3.96 million, once a regulator has intervened, every subsequent failure is judged against that history.
Part of a sustained enforcement run
ACMA says businesses have paid more than A$12 million in spam and telemarketing penalties over the past 18 months. The run includes the Latitude Finance penalty in 2026, the A$702,900 penalty against Lululemon for promotional content in unsubscribe-free transactional emails, and the A$500,800 penalty against PointsBet. We flagged the direction of travel in our analysis of Australia’s enforcement escalation, and the pattern has only hardened since.
What senders should take from this
Three practical lessons stand out. First, channel-level suppression must be enforced everywhere a send can originate, including campaign tools, journey builders, and any VIP or account-managed outreach that sits outside the main platform. Second, VIP and high-value segments are not exempt. Both of TAB’s ACMA actions centred on VIP customer contact. Third, self-reporting reduced the penalty here, but it did not prevent one. The cheaper path is suppression logic that works before the send, not disclosure after it.
