Companies could be fined up to £500,000 and board directors held responsible for an epidemic of nuisance phone calls and texts after ministers said the problem had hit “plague” levels across Britain.
Persistent texts promising compensation for payment protection insurance mis-selling and cold calls from companies pushing solar panels were among more than 15,000 complaints made to the information commissioner’s office (ICO) last month alone, and there have been more than 100,000 complaints over the past year.
Around four out of five people are regularly cold-called at home, and a third of them say they feel intimidated, according to research by the consumer body Which?
The government’s nuisance calls taskforce will set out 15 recommendations to tackle the “modern-day menace”, including trying to block lead generators from selling on customer telephone details.
Okay, so I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. This problem has been fixed. I’ve not had a nuisance call for two years (nearly three). The technology has been tried, tested and found to work. If people installed a Truecall unit the only calls they will get are those they choose to allow. It really is simple. It is not expensive (less than most people spend on a mobile phone) and it solves the problem completely. So, we don’t need more rules, we don’t need a task-force, we can fix it ourselves – there is a market solution that is far more effective than a state one. And if these companies keep getting messages telling them to hang up and not call again, they will, eventually, recognise that this marketing tactic is not working. Even those vile scumbags at MacKenzie Hall gave up calling me eventually…
On my mobile I use Phone Warrior, so no nuisance calls or texts get through on that, either.
…vile scumbags at MacKenzie Hall?
Our erstwhile tenant had a dispute over thirty quid with someone and MacKenzie Hall presumably bought the debt. Our number was the one on their records, so they tried plaguing us with calls in the hope of getting the money.
Why can’t I have a simple cheap phone answer unit with a message that I don’t want cold calls and that then requires the caller to simply press a number on their keypad to complete the connection and make the phone ring?
This would allow all friends and genuine people from unexpected locations etc to get through without any problems, dispense with lists, zap buttons and caller ID costs, it would block auto dialers with recorded messages and thus remove most cold callers.
Some phones do, I understand. Otherwise Truecall does exactly that.
Yeah, you could stop all these calls coming through, but when else does one get the opportunity to vent their tourettes syndrome?
Quite a number of companies have found a way around this restriction by outsourcing their call centres to overseas – mainly India and Eastern Europe. I have call identification on my phone but these annoying calls show “International” or “Witheld” and none of the blocking systems used has worked. My answerphone is regularly full of high pitched tones, but no message, from these firms (being self employed an answerphone is a necessity). The only victory, small though it was, was to threaten firms with invoices for my time in having to stop work to answer their call.
Without wishing to sound like a Truecall sales rep… Truecall will solve all of those. You can customise how it will respond to different types of call. Mine is set to reject international calls. The default is that it will intercept the call and ask the caller to say their name. If they do so, your phone will ring and you will be asked if you wish to take the call. Not a problem for legitimate callers. Junk callers will hang up. You can set your regular callers to come straight through.
Thanks for that. Will give it a try.
Yes indeed a big non-problem.
Enter numbers names of family, friends, plumber, butcher, baker etc into phone’s repertoire, then only answer those calls that display a stored contact.
Ignore all other calls. What is so difficult about that?
If there are people whose phones do not handle caller ID and link to stored contacts, buy one… they practically give them away.
On my phones I can assign ring tones, so my contacts have a different ring tone to the default for unknown callers, so I don’t even have to look to at the phone.