Optus fined $66 million for 'appalling' conduct in sales to telecom's
customers in Australia
[September 24, 2025] By
ROD McGUIRK
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — An Australian judge fined telecommunications
giant Optus 100 million Australian dollars ($66 million) Wednesday for
unconscionable conduct selling services to hundreds of vulnerable
customers including in Indigenous communities outside the range of its
coverage.
The subsidiary of Singapore government-owned Singtel is separately
facing multimillion-dollar fines over its failure last week to connect
hundreds of emergency calls due to an outage that’s been linked to four
deaths.
Federal Court Justice Patrick O’Sullivan approved a plea agreement
struck between Optus, Australia’s second-largest telecom, and the
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission over unconscionable
conduct and inappropriate sales practices spanning four years until July
2023.
He said Optus’ conduct was “extremely serious and can only be described
as appalling.”
“Optus senior management knew, or ought to have known, of the system
failures that allowed the unconscionable conduct which may rightly be
described as predatory,” O’Sullivan told the court.
“Of particular concern is the fact that Optus’ conduct predominantly
affected vulnerable consumers including people with mental disabilities,
people suffering from financial hardship, those with low financial
literacy and people with limited English proficiency and/or learning
difficulties,” he added.
Many victims were vulnerable Indigenous people from regional and remote
communities, some of whom lived outside the range of Optus mobile
coverage.
Optus sales staff applied undue pressure to customers, fabricated
customer details to ensure higher credit approvals for contracts and
then engaged debt collectors to recover what was owed.
[to top of second column] |
Optus Chief Executive Officer Stephen Rue speaks to the media during
press conference in Sydney, Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2025. (Bianca De
Marchi/AAP Image via AP)
 Following the ruling, Optus said in
a statement it was “remediating impacted customers as a matter of
priority.” The statement didn't detail that remediation.
Optus would also pay AU$1 million ($660,000) to support digital
literacy initiatives for Indigenous Australians.
When Optus admitted the corporate law breaches in June, chief
executive Stephen Rue described them as “inexcusable and
unacceptable.”
The judge’s criticisms came hours after Optus appointed an expert to
review the outage Sept. 18 that impacted 631 customers who tried to
phone emergency services. Four of those emergencies were fatal.
Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers said a government inquiry into the
outage would investigate whether the parent company Singtel was
providing Optus with sufficient money to make emergency calls
reliable.
Singtel chief executive Yuen Kuan Moon said the parent company had
invested AU$9.3 billion ($6.2 billion) in Optus in the past five
years to build network infrastructure across Australia.
Singtel “will continue to invest as needed for Optus to provide
reliable communication services to all Australians,” Moon said in a
statement.
Rue said Optus investigators have already established that the
latest outage was caused by “human error.”
“It’s not expenditure, it’s process. The standard processes were not
followed. That’s not an investment issue. That is people not
following processes,” Rue told reporters.
All contents © copyright 2025 Associated Press. All rights reserved |
