One of Australia's biggest supermarket chains has paid more than $1 million in a fine for spamming emails.
Woolworths was found to have breached spamming laws more than 5 million times, according to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).
The $1,003,800 fine is the largest ever issued by the ACMA.
Woolworths was found to have sent marketing emails to consumers after they had unsubscribed from previous messages.
"The spam rules have been in place for 17 years and Woolworths is a large and sophisticated organisation," ACMA chair Nerida O'Loughlin said.
"The scale and prolonged nature of the non-compliance is inexcusable.
"Woolworths failed to act even after the ACMA had warned it of potential compliance issues after receiving consumer complaints."
In a statement released by Woolworths, the company said an error with their system meant they were sending emails to accounts which were used by multiple people.
"Many of the breaches were the result of technical and systems issues, which we fixed in 2019," Amanda Bardwell, managing director of the company's digital arm WooliesX, said.
"Subsequent breaches occurred because we continued sending communications to email addresses shared by multiple rewards members, where only one member had made an unsubscribe request.
"While we were acting on unsubscribe requests from individual rewards members, we did not assume it meant other members sharing that email address had to be opted-out as well."
The company said all emails which have been involved in an unsubscribe request have now been removed from their mailing list.
This is the second major company to be issued with a fine from the ACMA for spamming breaches this year.
In January, Optus was fined more than $500,000 for spam texts and emails.
