The government is planning to make it easier to fine firms that hound members of the public with nuisance calls.
Currently, they can be punished only if unsolicited calls cause “substantial damage” to householders.
Ministers will also consult on imposing heftier fines. Some consumer groups say the measures do not go far enough.
The Information Commissioner’s Office received 120,310 complaints about “unsolicited marketing calls” from April-November 2013.
If you do a search on the Internet, there are plenty of people complaining about this nuisance. Yes, it is a nuisance – especially when companies hide under the umbrella of making research calls because they are not bound by the Telephone Preference rules.
Yet I have not had one nuisance call since January 2013. Okay it cost me just under a hundred quid, but that was a hundred quid well spent. So, instead of complaining that the government should do something, how about people doing it for themselves? Buy a Truecall unit and the calls stop. Stone dead. Although, I suppose there is a perverse pleasure that some people get having a moan about something that is within their power to stop if they chose to take responsibility for themselves. And that’s the point here, isn’t it? Personal responsibility. These days, when people complain about nuisance calls and they have been told how to put a stop to it and still carry on complaining having done nothing for themselves, my sympathy evaporates.
*Disclaimer: I have no connection with Truecall whatsoever other than as a satisfied customer.
In general, I’d agree with you, that people ought to find their own solutions rather than endlessly demanding that the state should ‘do something’, usually leading to unforeseen and unwanted consequences, as well as added costs to taxpayers. But in this one particular instance, unless a cost-free (to the taxpayer/victim) solution for those on the receiving end can be arrived at, legislation may be the only the solution.
Having reached a point where I was receiving 10-15 of these calls a day, some as late as 11pm, I changed my phone number. One year on, I am now back to 3-6 calls a day and no doubt it will rise. As someone who is disabled and living on the fixed income of my pension, I simply don’t have £100 to spend on a unit to solve this problem. (Nor did I have £60+ to spend to replace my aerial when digital switchover came along, so I no longer have a TV either, through no choice of mine, so I am no advocate of centralised ‘making improvements’ policies.) So I am stuck with these calls day after day, which, even with caller display and an answer phone, are disruptive and annoying. I would like someone with some power to ‘do something’ since nothing I have tried so far has worked and I lack the resources to buy my way out of the problem, sadly.
If you have caller ID and an answer phone presumably to screen calls, what’s your problem?
You can see/hear whether you want to take the call.
If it’s that ‘disruptive’ and annoying, unplug your phone!
Lots of things are annoying, but life is a compromise, not perfection.
On the strength of your recommendation in a post long ago, I bought myself a Truecall unit. I was getting 10-15 nuisance calls a day. One or two have got through, where a recorded message fooled the unit into thinking that someone was giving their name in the Whisper process and dialled it through, but other than that, problem solved. Well worth the hundred quid it cost me. I can sympathise with the above poster living on a fixed income. One can only hope that prices will fall if enough people buy them, although I understand that the Truecall company is not in great health.
Unsolicited phone calls are a massive invasion of privacy, and should be punished with bamboo under the fingernails and at least a decade in solitary. For a first offence.
Truecall: highly recommended.
The answer to the recorded call is the shield and whisper. I use that for pretty much everything outside of my known callers. Yes, I have sympathy with those who cannot afford it – however, many of those moaning can and if enough of us did it, the business model for cold calling would collapse.
If you can’t afford Truecall an answer phone works just as well. We ignore phone calls unless we recognise the voice and our friends know to wait for us to get to the phone. Those who don’t leave a message. I suppose the ring might be annoying late at night, but just turn the phone off.
Pitkin: If you can’t afford an aerial just stick to iPlayer and the like. Then you don’t need to pay for a TV licence either.
Which is what I’ve done. Not that I’ve any use for the BBC now any more than before. But other catch-up services work fine, along with a world of free sport out there in greynet. And the TV licence money pays for the broadband, so that’s ok.
Turning the phone off at night would be lovely, but with very elderly and unwell parents that just ain’t an option either, which is one reason why all those sales calls are so damned irritating, grrrr.
I use a different plan which doesnt cost a penny. It works like this :
I answer ALL calls with one word – “Hello”. If its someone who wants ME they will ask for me by Name. Cold calling companies usually dont know who they are calling, they want YOU to tell them, which I never do. In this case there is some delay after my initial “Hello” while they find out who they are supposed to be talking to. By the time they have found out, I have long gone. Sometimes just to be really mean, I wait until they come back with the name of the person they want to talk to I then say something like “Hang on, while I just go and get them”. I then leave them hanging on until they give up. I get a perverse sense of pleasure in knowing that I’ve beaten them at their own game, and as far as I am aware have not missed a genuine call yet, and at least one company has finally given up.
“So, instead of complaining that the government should do something, how about people doing it for themselves?”
Because people should have to spend their own money to protect themselves from scum? How about we kick the scum until the scum stop behaving like scum?
“These days, when people complain about nuisance calls and they have been told how to put a stop to it and still carry on complaining having done nothing for themselves, my sympathy evaporates”
Like shit, everyone has sympathy. Some produce more of it, some less. It is a matter between them and their diet. What is needed is that the state provides effective protection from criminal behaviour. And those that trespass on the property of others, such as cold caller merchants, are criminals. I’d have thought that argument would have appealed to libertarians?
We let any numbers that we don’t recognise go to voicemail. This works but it is not ideal. I have suggested to Mrs. Stonyground that we get a truecall unit on LR’s recommendation, we are thinking about it. It irks me slightly that there must be a small but significant minority of people who actually respond to cold calling by buying something. A plague upon their houses because without them the problem wouldn’t even exist.
Poppa
I always answer with the last 4 digits of my number …..
However, the real problem is that most of these bastards are calling from outside the EU, & therefore the cold-calling rules don’t apply.
If I have time, I’m as deliberatly rude, & religiously offensive as I can possibly be [ Because the caller will, almost certainly be either a Hindu or a moslem – telling them to have serial sex with a cow/pig usually gets the message across …..
Most modern telephones are capable of showing ‘caller ID’, and it usually costs only about £1 per month, less if you pay your charges ‘up-front’ for the year.
Don’t recognise the number? Don’t answer the call. I rather like some of the other ideas put forward, mind you, especially Mr Tingey’s!
1. Get a phone that has caller ID and has contacts and can assign different ring-tones to numbers listed in contacts.
2. Assign a specific ring-tone to contacts.
3. Numbers not in contacts will have default ring-tone. Don’t answer.
What could be simpler? Problem solved instead of whinging or demanding Government (taxpayer funded) action.
Many will already have phones like this; new ones that do cost considerably less than £100.
Yep, a straightforward answerphone with caller ID is the simplest way. True, some of those recorded messages get through but there seem to be far less of those around these days – I think that the companies have learned that a real person is much more likely to dupe an intellectually-challenged customer than a recorded message is (and a recorded message is a darned sight easier to hang up on without our natural good manners kicking in). So they’ve gone back to using people – and real people sales-callers never, ever leave a message. But I guess a business line (which can’t just be left to ring) probably requires a more sophisticated system such as you’ve got, LR.
To connect a call, all telephone exchanges have to know both the source and the destination numbers. A simple Act of Parliament dictating that all telephone calls always show the caller ID to the person dialed would really be all that is needed here. Once you know where the phone call originates from, you can build logic into the receiving apparatus (like the Truecall machine does) to decide what to do with incoming calls based upon call number.
You can also start building lists of known spammers, as the likes of Spamcop and Spamassassin do for emails. You can even build a set of lists comprising Government-registered originating numbers (police, hospitals and so on) which are 100% genuine and ought to be whitelisted, UK companies to be greylisted in some manner, and noted foreign spammers to be blacklisted.
It all depends on getting that vital caller ID. Without caller ID, you have to assume that any incoming call without an ID is a spammer and simply put these straight to voicemail, or straight to “Type in a passcode or wait for voicemail”.
I don’t see why I should spend my money to stop these nuisance calls. My technique is to make the caller repeat their company name and spell it out if I can’t catch it the second time. Then I ask for their address. And the post code. And the telephone number. At some stage during this process the caller usually asks why I want this information and I reply along the lines “You’re going to try to sell me something, I want to know who to contact if it goes wrong.” Once they’ve given me as much information as they’re going to give I tell them to take my name and number off their database and not call me again and hang up.
However, if it’s the “Windows Helpdesk” and I’m not busy I’ll keep them on the line as long as I can. While they’re talking to me they can’t be scamming some other poor fool. I kept one on the line for about 45 minutes once. I usually end it by telling them I’m using Linux. 😈
The responses to this thread are the same ones that always crop up when this subject is discussed – and I’ve heard them all before and they are always tediously identical, so rather than respond to each one individually, I’ll deal with all of them here. Firstly, yes, I know I can use an answering machine and differing ring-tones to filter calls. I was doing that before. But the phone still rings and I still have to pay it attention. I would prefer that the phone only rings when it is someone I wish to speak to. Enter stage left, Truecall.
I have neither time, inclination nor patience to answer sales calls and bugger about playing silly games with them. If I am sitting down to a meal, reading, watching television or otherwise engaged the ringing telephone is an intrusion, I would rather not be disturbed unless it is someone I wish to speak to – so it is better if the phone does not ring in the first place. Enter stage right Truecall.
As for paying – well, we live in an imperfect world and sometimes we have to pay for solutions to problems. Get over it. The people at Truecall have invested time, money and effort in producing a product that is 100% effective in dealing with unsolicited sales calls. The measly £100 is small change frankly – and having invested in a solution why shouldn’t they get paid for their efforts?
Unsolicited calls come into the category “minor nuisance”. Life is full of minor nuisances, if I pay £100 to rid myself of this minor irritation the other 1001 still remain. If I could pay £100 to rid myself of ALL minor irritations that would be tempting but I probably wouldn’t. I would have nothing left to moan about 🙁
How minor the nuisance is will depend on how many calls people receive and how much value they place on peace and quiet. £100 for a complete cure that is a one-off payment is a piffling amount, frankly and that £100 has given me nearly eighteen months of peace and quiet with more yet to come. Other minor nuisances, I’ll deal with as and when they annoy me sufficiently – and if that means buying a product or service, I’ll give it due consideration. What I don’t do is complain about a minor nuisance when there is a perfectly good solution to be had.
Either way, I’m certainly not willing to engage these people and play with them as you do. I have better things to do with my time.
I’d never heard of Truecall until you mentioned it in a post over a year ago…
I cannot thank you enough for that, nor can I fault the unit itself; we went from 5-6 nuisance calls a day to nothing. NOT ONE in the year it’s been installed.
Best £80 I’ve ever spent.