Categories
End User nuisance calls and messages

Telephone Preference Service

I’m getting a lot of traffic for the post on the Telephone Preference Service. It’s no surprise. If your house is anything like ours we get scam calls on a daily basis. Someone needs to do something about it.

We have varying strategies for dealing with the scammers in our house. These range from keeping them hanging on for 10 – 15 minutes to just swearing at them and telling them to “go away”.

I favour the latter but the choice is yours.

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

8 replies on “Telephone Preference Service”

The TPS has certainly become increasingly useless; perhaps we need a more intelligent solution like the Akismet anti-spam system for forums and CMS (e.g. WordPress). This would allow home owners to report such calls and then the system could simply identify the most common occurrences and blacklist them against a whitelist of valid companies/numbers etc.

The telephone system is becoming increasingly IP based so in the future such a thing might be possible. Just an idea and I’d grant you that the Akismet approach is not perfect but it seems to work quite well when handling internet spam.

I have also just been cutting them off or leaving them hanging but since seeing a guy on the TV from Information Commission Office ( I think) about using complaints to fine such companies I have decided to ask their names so I can report them. If they are not reported then no-one will do anything.

Granted you cannot get these details from the automated calls which go silent and the ones which leave a recorded message and no tel no. but I can try and do my bit.

Its fine reporting them to the TPS but I’ve yet to have a single response other than “Sorry we couldn’t find the company you are reporting and can’t do any investigation if we cant identify them” so all the company has to do is lie about its name and nothing happens

Your’e right James. They are scammers & apparently based out of Indian call centres in the main. They are very difficult to get at.

I get loads and am on the TPS
I have Caller ID and Choose to Refuse it means I can block the persistent ones and be ready to unload abuse at the others…… just be sure you make a note the mother in laws number / save it in the phone! trust me on this 🙂

Saying this Text messages are getting worse “you can claim thousands” etc

on another note spammers at the door just tell them “its rented” they soon go with no questions 🙂

How about answering the phone with another language ? It doesn’t even have to be a rare one like Navaho. A little German can throw a cold caller right into the kraut.

I was pleased when The Apprentice saw an outbreak of moral courage and blew out the woman with the call centre idea, calling it “a grubby little business”.

Do you know *anyone* that wants to receive these calls ? TPS by default, opt-in to receive junk calls instead would be my vote.

We need to get banks, NHS and the like correctly presenting CLI for starters, then we can use technology to block the unavailable numbers with confidence.

Good idea Phil. I only answer 50% of calls that have number withheld. Most of them are rubbish calls but unfortunately some useful organisations still blank out their number. Note also I did recently take a call that was presenting a mobile CLI only to find it was an Asian call centre scammer.

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