Optus has been ordered by the Federal Court of Australia to pay a $100 million fine resulting from “inappropriate sales practices” between August 2019 and July 2023. It comes less than a week after Optus confirmed its second major triple-zero outage in two years.
Optus previously agreed to the penalty after the ACCC took court action against the telco in June 2025. According to the ACCC’s announcement, over 400 customers across 16 Optus stores were sold products they could not afford. Some customers were then pursued by debt collectors as a result of not being able to pay for the products they had been sold.
Many of these customers came from disadvantaged backgrounds, including those who did not speak English as a first language. The ACCC explained that “many of the consumers were First Nations Australians from regional, remote and very remote parts of Australia.”
One example of Optus’ conduct included pressuring customers to buy expensive phones and accessories they didn’t need. Misleading customers into thinking that some products were free or bundled at no extra cost was another example highlighted by the ACCC.
In today’s Federal Court hearing, Justice Patrick O’Sullivan labelled Optus’ conduct as “appalling”.
“Numerous individuals experienced severe financial harm, emotional distress, and social shame,” Justice O’Sullivan said.
“Particularly damaging was the heightened risk of losing access to essential telecommunications services when faced with inflated service costs.”
Echoing the Federal Court’s findings, ACCC Deputy Chair Catriona Lowe lamented that Optus did not prevent the misconduct in the first place.
“A company of Optus’s size should have had better systems and controls in place to identify and stop this sort of behaviour,” Lowe said.
Optus is also subject to a five-year court-enforceable undertaking aimed at compensating customers and improving its internal systems. The telco also committed to paying $1 million “to support digital literacy initiatives for First Nations Australians”.
