I don’t know anyone who isn’t getting increasingly
infuriated by the number of nuisance phone calls to their home phones. And now
the problem has been extended with unwanted calls and texts to mobile phones.
The latest research by Which shows that nearly one in
ten people received 50 unwanted calls or more in the last month, mainly from
Payment Protection Insurance and accident claim companies. Even when people
take action by signing up to the Telephone Preference Service (TPS), they still
received on average ten unsolicited calls in the last month.
It is suggested that people are often targeted with nuisance
calls and texts because at some point they ‘ticked the box’ giving
consent to companies not only to contact them but also to pass on their
personal data to third parties. I don’t believe a word of it. It is clear that
many call centre companies take absolutely no regard for the laws on privacy
and will just pursue anyone for whom they have a telephone number.
And, this isn’t confined to overseas call centres, as is
demonstrated by the recent hefty fine for a Welsh call centre, currently
featured in a series of TV programmes. Unfortunately, far too often, these
callers hide behind ‘withheld’ or phony (sic) international numbers that make
it difficult for people to report in the expectation of action being taken.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the telephone
network operators aren’t really bothered by all this as, after all, they are
making a lot of money out of both criminal and unlawful calls and spam. The
network operators have all sorts of technical ways in which this can be reduced
eg spam filtering technology, and only transmitting multiple calls from
registered phones.
This is why I’m backing a Which campaign - Calling
Time on Nuisance Calls and Texts campaign. Find out more, and add your
support at www.which.co.uk/callingtime
