Watchdog Cold Caller article

aliasojo

Was interested is seeing Martin's piece about cold callers. I'll be printing off a sign shortly.

I had someone from British Gas knock on my door recently. I wont go through the whole tedious story but the short version is I told the BG woman I wasn't interested and went to close the door and she shouted 'F*ck you' at me in front of my 10 year old and adult disabled son.

Needless to say I got onto the phone there and then to complain. I appreciate cold callers have a job to do but the majority of people dislike this method of contact and there are clearly some callers that are in the wrong job.

MothballsWallet

Ofcom are, once again, showing how useless a regulator they are - a chocolate fireguard would be more effective against a flamethrower. Forget fining the offenders, an Ofcom fine is chump change to these companies. Ofcom is like someone with no teeth who's had their dentures nicked.

The best way to stop these callers is to ensure that they can be tracked and brought to book.

As I've said on another thread on here, all phone calls have the caller and callee number in the system: I could tell you the reason for this, but I'd have to "geek out" and could bore you to sleep Withholding the number simply sets an option in the network to stop the callee's exchange from displaying or recording that caller's number.

I think all companies using cold/silent calls should obey TPS without question, there should be both EU- and UN-level TPS-style scheme with severe penalties for offenders, and present, as a minimum, the phone number for either the switchboard or the Do Not Call list manager's office.

Also, I thought Ofgem didn't have quite the same responsibilities or powers as they did before Consumer Focus was set up?