Last Updated on September 8, 2026
Most business owners treat the phone number, the domain and the address in the footer as admin. Pick one, paste it in, move on.
The Advertising Standards Authority has just treated those three things as a claim about who you are and where you are, and upheld a complaint because of it.
What happened
On 19 August 2026 the ASA upheld a ruling against Fenix Biomed BV, a Netherlands company trading in the UK as A Love of Humanity, a body donation service. The complaint came from the Human Tissue Authority. It was a single complaint, reference A26-1335933.
The ad was the company’s own website, seen on 7 April 2026. The homepage carried a +44 phone number, a .co.uk domain and email address, and a Norwich postal address at the foot of the page. Fenix Biomed BV confirmed to the ASA that it was incorporated and registered in the Netherlands, with no registered office or incorporated subsidiary in the UK.
The defence is the part worth reading, because it is the defence almost any business would give.
They said the Norwich address was a correspondence address, used to send information and consent packs to prospective UK donors.
They said the UK phone number let people call at local rates and speak to English-speaking staff.
They said a .co.uk domain and email address was standard practice for anyone offering services to UK consumers.
The ASA recorded all of that. It upheld the complaint anyway.
The ASA called the UK phone number, email address and physical address “strong indicators of a UK-based business”, particularly because they appeared on the homepage alongside requests to contact the company.
The mistake: assuming a disclosure counts because it exists somewhere
The company had disclosed it. Page two of the downloadable information booklet said A Love of Humanity was a division of Fenix Biomed BV based in the Netherlands. Nobody could register without receiving that booklet, because the registration documents were inside it.
It made no difference. The ASA’s finding was that the information “was not made clear in the ad itself and appeared only in a separate booklet that consumers had to click through to access”.
That is the sentence to take away.
A correction that lives one click deeper than the claim is not a correction. If the homepage creates the impression, the homepage has to fix it. Not the PDF, not the FAQ, not page four of the terms.
This is not just a story about a Dutch company
The ruling was decided under CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 3.1, 3.3 and 3.9, on misleading advertising and qualification. Those rules cover your own website. Not just paid ads. Not just big spenders.
Which makes this list uncomfortably familiar.
| What you set up | What a first-time visitor reads |
|---|---|
| A local landline for a town you have no premises in | “There is an office here” |
| A “Plumbers in Sheffield” page, written from 30 miles away | “They are based in Sheffield” |
| A virtual office or mail-forwarding address in the footer | “That is where they work from” |
| A .co.uk domain on a business run from abroad | “This is a UK business” |
| “Nationwide coverage” when you subcontract most of it | “Their own people do the work” |
None of those are illegal. All of them are claims. Most were set up for the same practical, well-meaning reasons Fenix Biomed gave, and most have never been checked since.
This is the same problem as when your own business details contradict each other across your site, your listings and your invoices. The difference is that the ASA has now put a ruling behind it.
The test the ASA actually applied
Two questions, in order.
One: does the overall presentation create an impression?
Not “did you state something false”, but what a normal person would conclude from the page as a whole. Three UK signals sitting next to a contact prompt were enough.
Two: is that impression material?
Meaning, would it change what someone decides to do. Here it plainly was, because remains would not be repatriated to the UK.
For your business, question two is simpler than it sounds. Would a customer still have called if they had known where you actually are, how far you travel, or who actually turns up on the day? If the honest answer is “possibly not”, the detail is material, and material information belongs on the page.
What to do this week
This is a Start-stage job. Twenty minutes, no budget.
- Open your homepage as a stranger. Write down, in one sentence, where a first-time visitor would assume you are based and who they think does the work.
- Write the true version next to it.
- Where the two differ, fix it on the page itself. Usually one line near the contact details is enough. “Based in Bradford, covering West Yorkshire” costs you nothing and closes the gap.
- Run the same test on every city page, service-area page and Google Business Profile you have.
- Make your identity checkable. When we ran our study checking 86 UK tradespeople against Companies House, four were listed by directories under registration numbers belonging to companies that were dissolved or in an insolvency process. Being a sole trader with no company record is normal and legal. Publishing a number that disproves your own listing is not.
The takeaway
Your contact details are the cheapest advertising claim you will ever make, and the one you are least likely to have checked.
The ASA cannot fine you. Its main sanction is publication: your name, your ad, and a paragraph explaining exactly what you implied, on a public website, indefinitely. Advertisers who do not comply get referred to Trading Standards.
But the ruling matters more as a warning than a threat. Every shortcut in that table was invented to look more established than you are, which is the same instinct that ends with trust signals getting gamed until they stop meaning anything. The businesses that win locally are usually the ones that stopped pretending to be everywhere.
Say where you are. Say what you cover. Put it on the page, not in the PDF.
