Ways to stop overseas sales calls discussion

gymm

My dad is of a 'certain generation' and commendably assumes anonymous phone callers should be genuine and have legitimate reasons for calling him. In 2012 we have to assume they are up to taking advantage of the vulnerable. I set him up with TPS, caller ID etc etc but despite me saying don't answer if the number is international or withheld, he will and somehow can't put the phone down. His phone lists 100 incoming numbers and he is able to tell me on a daily basis how many he gets which is frightening. I suspect he has ordered something from an advert in the past and not realising it, included his phone number and not indicated the 'no transfer of info' option. A few weeks ago he told me he received a call from a company frightening him about selling his house to pay nursing home fees and that an appointment had been made for someone to come the next day to discuss it. As it was his birthday (88) and he said he didn't want anything I decided to see what I could do and I found a device called call blocker which answers calls, plays a prerecorded message about no sales/cold calls/ charity calls and to remove this number from their list if they were from them. It then says legitimate and invited callers and friends to press a number on the keypad to proceed and his phone then rings. In fact there are options he can give to family which makes his phone then ring in a certain pattern which identifies the caller. When it answers a call it rings twice then pauses to engage the message then rings upon the button being pressed so it alerts him of a possible call and then if it rings after the message he knows they are legitimate. He has personalised the message since as he said the caller hears his voice and would listen to instructions and not think they have mis-dialed. I am pleased and relieved it works and indeed he told me he has logs of 4 international calls which happened when he was there and no number ones (10) which the system blocked successfully. The downside for me is that I can't send texts to his home phone now, but the security is necessary so I am not concerned about this problem. He has not had any uninvited callers for a month for which we are both pleased about! The things we have to do.........

yangptangkipperbang

cheeswright wrote: »

Hi I was just skimming through this post when I realised -
nobody was mentioning that you can get your imformation removed from the publicly visable / buyable electoral register
which is where these folks get your numbers from
all you have to do is check the box on your next voting form from the council....
its near the bottom and says it will do just this.....

hope that helps someone

It won't help - your 'phone number isn't on the Electoral Register !

stoatwblr

I'm surprised noone has pointed this out yet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_Preference_Service

Basically:

0: TPS breaches are handled by the ICO and you are fully entitled to complain to the ICO directly (I'd encourage going that way: I have complained to the TPS and found that complaints were not passed on to the ICO in 4 out of 5 cases)

1: Calls made from an overseas call centre on behalf of a UK company DO fall under TPS remit.

2: Genuine market research calls don't - however if the call morphs into a sales call (or the same company calls back on a sales call - showing the first one wasn't market research) then the company is in breach of the rules.

3: (not mentioned) - political calls are exempt from TPS.

4: Established relationships are enough to give exemption from TPS unless the customer explicitly opts out from sales calls (watch those checkboxes!), however once the customer opts out TPS rules apply. (Customers must OPT-IN to SMS and email, breaches of that rule are handled by the ASA)

In general the only outfits who ignore TPS registration are scammers. I do find it tempting to follow the money - and I'm aware of some individuals who have done so in order to find out who's passing themselves off as their mobile provider.

Whilst all the laws aimed at consumer protection in telephony and advertising are worded to allow for breaches _per_incident_, the TPS, Ofcom, ICO and ASA refuse to deal with individual incidents - if they did do the scamming outfits would not only be out of business they'd be bankrupted.

Rewording the laws to allow a right of private action would solve a number of issues (see the USA's TCPA) but politicians here are reluctant to do so because they're afraid the courts would be flooded out. This allows the current unsatisfactory situation to continue.

maninthestreet

gymm wrote: »

My dad is of a 'certain generation' and commendably assumes anonymous phone callers should be genuine and have legitimate reasons for calling him. In 2012 we have to assume they are up to taking advantage of the vulnerable. I set him up with TPS, caller ID etc etc but despite me saying don't answer if the number is international or withheld, he will and somehow can't put the phone down. His phone lists 100 incoming numbers and he is able to tell me on a daily basis how many he gets which is frightening. I suspect he has ordered something from an advert in the past and not realising it, included his phone number and not indicated the 'no transfer of info' option. A few weeks ago he told me he received a call from a company frightening him about selling his house to pay nursing home fees and that an appointment had been made for someone to come the next day to discuss it. As it was his birthday (88) and he said he didn't want anything I decided to see what I could do and I found a device called call blocker which answers calls, plays a prerecorded message about no sales/cold calls/ charity calls and to remove this number from their list if they were from them. It then says legitimate and invited callers and friends to press a number on the keypad to proceed and his phone then rings. In fact there are options he can give to family which makes his phone then ring in a certain pattern which identifies the caller. When it answers a call it rings twice then pauses to engage the message then rings upon the button being pressed so it alerts him of a possible call and then if it rings after the message he knows they are legitimate. He has personalised the message since as he said the caller hears his voice and would listen to instructions and not think they have mis-dialed. I am pleased and relieved it works and indeed he told me he has logs of 4 international calls which happened when he was there and no number ones (10) which the system blocked successfully. The downside for me is that I can't send texts to his home phone now, but the security is necessary so I am not concerned about this problem. He has not had any uninvited callers for a month for which we are both pleased about! The things we have to do.........

Are you referring to Truecall or somethine else:

http://www.truecall.co.uk/

silverswan

I really think the government or the telephone services should be doing more to help us with these scam calls. I had 13 on 1 day last week, and most of them said 'international' but one gave an actual number from India.I found that most rang only 4 times so I've now stopped answering them and told my daughter in the USA to keep ringing and leave a message on the answerphone. To the few people who have sympathy for these tele-nuisances, I'd add that trying to sell you something, although annoying, is a lot different from trying to scam your bank account which is just plain illegal.
My friend gave one of them a lot of verbal abuse and he phoned back saying she was a very rude lady and he was going to report her! (To whom I wondered?) Another friend asked the Asian sounding gentle man if he knew the river Indus? He replied Yes, to which my friend said "well dip your head in it 3 times, but only bring it up twice!"
To telemarketers I just say 'no thanks, I don't deal with anything over the phone,' but to these scumbags who are trying to fleece me with the old computer scam, I have been less than ladylike in the past but now check for the word international and just ignore it.

John_Pierpoint

Not sure that there all that many scam calls from Australia or the Americas to rich Indian people.
I expect the Nigerians will do their bit but does the Suez canal count as overseas?

dark_lady

And UK Today called again yesterday at 11 am. !!!!!!!s.

pogofish

stoatwblr wrote: »

I'm surprised noone has pointed this out yet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_Preference_Service

Maybe because TPS is a total waste of time when it comes to dealing with the vast majority of cold-calling scammers?

Even where a UK company that could be actioned is involved, the trail between the them and the call centre is usually full of twists and turns via middlemen in a variety of far away places who hire the call centers in other places in ways that make it extremely difficult for TPS to prove that the UK firm is directly involved.

Then there are the ones that don't bother at all. Almost nothing can be done against them.

The only thing that might work is for the major telecom operators to stop selling blocks of overseas call time at prices that make this scam worthwile. They would soon dry-up if they were paying a realistic price for the calls.

Justamum

My DH has just had a phone call from 'Angela' with a strong Indian accent. She was trying the computer virus scam. He said to her "to save time, would you just like my bank account details now?". She put the phone down! :rotfl:

NonGeographicalMan

pogofish wrote: »

The only thing that might work is for the major telecom operators to stop selling blocks of overseas call time at prices that make this scam worthwile. They would soon dry-up if they were paying a realistic price for the calls.

Unfortunately a realistic price for calling the UK from India is now basically near zero and so it is always affordable for them to do so. This is due to the invention of a phone calling system you may not have heard of called Voip that means they can get the call all the way to the UK for free apart from the last part of the connection to a UK home landline number. The latter access can be purchased very cheaply in bulk.

The main obstacle to people in the third world calling is their access to cheap telecoms through good IT infrastructure and whether or not they claim to be able to speak English. India now has the former but doesn't have the latter but unfortunately this doesn't seem to stop them calling anyway given they they mistakenly believe their form of English is understandable by or acceptable to UK citizens for marketing purposes.

The reason we get so many calls from India is because they have so damn many people (over 1 billion). Having said that it seems odd that so far a Nigerian call centre industry linked to the UK has not yet boomed given that there are over 100 million of them and their English is at least ore more understandable to UK ears than Indian English.