I despair sometimes, I really do.
A couple who fell ill on holiday were billed £4,250 for backing out of a sickness compensation claim.
In September 2016, Jackie and Steve Reeves were contacted by a cold-caller who asked whether they had fallen ill abroad.
As it turns out, they had fallen ill, but had not considered making a claim. And there is should have rested.
In November 2016, the couple received a 34-page contract from Liverpool-based High Street Solicitors.
Which they didn’t bother to read properly.
Jackie says: ‘All of a sudden, I thought: “This is getting out of hand.” The issue had snowballed and had become far too much for me to take on. Going to court would be my worst nightmare.’
Then, on a holiday to Cyprus in August, the couple fell ill again. They concluded, rightly or wrongly, that they were susceptible to stomach bugs in foreign countries.
‘We couldn’t in all good conscience continue with the claim,’ Jackie says. ‘We only claimed because the cold-caller was so persuasive.’
Unfortunately, that decision cost them in cancellation costs. The moral here is twofold – read the contract and make sure you understand what you are getting into. The second and simpler solution is to always hang up on cold callers no matter what they are peddling. It’s because people such as this give them the time of day that they continue to spread their poison.
I moved about a year ago, and got a new phone number. (I never use the land line, but it’s part of the internet package). I didn’t give the number to anyone, so I know that every time it rings (unanswered), it’s someone trying to sell me something. Likewise, I never answer my mobile to an unidentified number unless I’m expecting a call from a company.
Cold calling is one of the worst aspects of modern life. I hate it.
I use my mobile for work, so answer calls I don’t recognise. I simply hang up on cold calls. Truecall sorts out the landline.
In other news, every double glazing salesman is making for his house to try and get his signature, and every pikey in the north wants to do a deal to tarmac his drive…
I have on many occasions asked my cell phone provider, my land line provider and suppliers of answering machines and similar for one thing.
I want a device or software that will refuse all calls from numbers not in my own personal lists of eligible callers. If you want to call me I want to know you first.
If not, I don’t want your ringtone or your voicemail, I want you to die, a horrible, but immediate death, involving pustulent syphilitic buboes on your sexual parts, exploding in gouts of pus and blood before your horrified family.
But I’m not going to get either the relief from your calls or relief of your horrid death, because the fix is in.
If anyone provided such a device or software I expect telecom hit teams would rub us all out.
In the UK, we have Truecall. The unit costs about £100 and fits between the socket and the phone. It will filter everything out but white-listed numbers. I installed mine in January 2013 and haven’t had one single unsolicited call on the landline since. As for the mobile, no such technology exists, so call blockers are reactive.