Telecommunication companies in the Kingdom will have to cough up as much as SR 25 million in penalties if they indulge in bulk messaging of promotional material without entering into an agreement with the authorities concerned for such activities.

The Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) has made it clear that severe penalties would be imposed on companies which do not adhere to prevailing laws which stipulate that promotional bulk text messages cannot be sent without entering into an agreement.

A local newspaper quoted the CITC spokesman as saying that “in the event of subscribers lodging complaint that they are being subjected to these messages, the commission will take action against such violators.”

“Those indulging in such activities will be produced before the committee which deals with such violations and penalties can be as high as high SR 25 million if proven,” he said.

According to him, the commission had already looked into some cases of licensed service providers who violated the norms. “Their licenses were canceled after the committee found that they had indeed infringed on telecommunications laws by sending spam messages, which could involve fraudulent content,” he said.

He, however, denied that they had received any complaint from service providers claiming that their networks had been hacked to send promotional bulk messages.