The blog is getting a lot of visits to posts about nuisance calls and messages. There are clearly a lot of pests out there.
If you suffer from this you can report incidents to the Information Commissioner’s Office at this site here.
Feel free to leave a comment with any progress or otherwise.
Particularly active numbers are 08000641087 (post here) and 01616626518 (post here)
3 replies on “How to complain about nuisance calls and messages”
I reported a number and said I had a recording. Heard nothing from them.
Apparently they prosecuted 4 companies in 2 years and seem to go for the auto diallers set to cause too many phantom calls.
I had a call about loft insulation and strung them along. A few days later I was called by a company and I asked how they obtained my details. They said they had been contacted by a company who could sell them some good leads. They said give us 25 to try and found they were useless. The only contact was a phone number in India and an email address.
Another company said the TPS was only 60% effective (?) and they were calling me because other people in the area were interested. I gave up arguing that did not mean they could ignore the TPS and call me.
I also discovered that some similar calls were from a call centre in Leamington Spa.
This is an interesting company – http://www.leadstoyou.net/
In my experience TPS is useless. Nuisance callers are either from overseas, and hence not subject to the TPS rules, or even if they are UK based don’t care about it anyway because the chances of being prosecuted are so slim that it’s more lucrative to flout the rules regardless. Reporting anyone to the TPS is equally useless, since they normally just reply to say they can’t follow it up. Reporting to the Information Commissioner normally results in either no reply, or a reply to say they can’t follow up every individual complaint because they are too busy.
I have looked at this device in the past which from the description sounds like it may work well (land lines only): http://www.truecall.co.uk/home.aspx. However, at £100 for the machine plus an annual subscription, I’m not rushing to buy one.
Please bear in mind that currently, business to business SMS text messages are allowed, so if some small business sends you a text, and the content is clearly aimed at a business rather than consumer offer, then both OFCOM and the ICO should explain the message is permitted.
I know, because I wanted to find a way to contact businesses in relation to a service I offer. I would not knowingly contact any private user number, so I am using numbers related to businesses in certain sectors. I also plan to give commission to those business users that recommend others as customers.
Of course it may change in future, but I hope any business users will remember that some of the “protections” aimed at consumers do not apply to them, especially if they have put their mobile number online as a contact number.
I quite understand the wish to block or report calls/ texts but want to remind people that not all are against the guidelines/ law.
I too get junk calls from the likes of that 08000 number in your post – I just had one, hence finding your blog, but generally use an Android App to block any numbers not in my contacts list {OK, rather restricting, I know, but it is for clients and relatives to reach me, not for sales!}…
The call came in on one of my 5+ mobile numbers (cannot remember which logs to that specific GMail account), but I was out anyway, at the time!