talkmagic.co.uk

Cold callers are actually getting much more persistent.

AND silent calls are a pain in the backside, for sure.

Most silent calls come through as an 08*** number, so just don't answer. If it's important, they'll leave a message.

Cold caller strategies:
If it's double glazing or home improvements, just tell them you rent your property, thanks for the time.

If it's mobile phones or landline reductions, tell them you're housesitting, and can they please not call again as the owners work for BT or THREE or VODAFONE etc, and they get their calls paid for anyway.

These little 'white' lies will get you instant 'thank you, sorry for bothering you' results, and you've not needed to be rude at all.

My dad is the King of telemarketing calls.

Once some window company phoned up.

Caller: Good Evening Sir, can I interest you in brand new windows, at a knock-down price?
Dad: Yes
Caller: (clearly thrilled) And how many windows do you have?
Dad: One
Caller: One?
Dad: One in each room
Caller: Excellent, and can I ask what colour they are?
Dad: I don't really know
Caller: White, brown?
Dad: No...I can see through them...
Caller: The frames Sir. What colour are they?
Dad: Kinda green...
Caller: Green?
Dad: Yeah. Well they were brown. Then the mold set in.

And so on, till the excited caller decides he will phone back with a quote. Five minutes later my mum answers the phone and tells the caller that he can't have been speaking to her husband, since he died five years ago.

Another time, a caller phoned saying my dad should come along to a time share meeting. If he were to sign up, him and another person could go free.

Dad: But who would I take?
Caller: Your wife perhaps?
Dad: Nah. She's no fun. What about my girlfriend?
Caller: If that is who you wish to take
Dad: Are you sure my wife won't find out?
Caller: We will send the details to your address, but they will be addressed to you
Dad: That's no good, what if the wife opens the letter?
Caller: You could say you are taking her?
Dad: But then the girlfriend will get upset. We only get to make love when the cleaners at work clear my desk, there's no where else to do it...

The Caller hung up soon after.

We have a different ringtones for different calls. If its the one we dont answer because its a withheld telemarketing call. If its another sound its someone that we know so we answer. Last time i checked we had 47 missed calls.

If i answer on an accident, i just tend to wander off to make a drink, put some music on or change the channel whilst they talk to the cushion, or the cat.

Oh and another one of my favourites is if you have a touch tone phone, press random buttons every so often and tell them to stop doing that.

Thank you for your assistance guys. Have registered with the TPS and the silent calls seem to have stopped! Mind you it's only been a week though, you can never be too confident when it comes to telemarketers.

I registered with the TPS a couple of years ago, and aside from a few issues, it has improves things greatly. Things to bear in mind are

1) It doesn't work for mobile phones - you have to badger your network to deal with the problem
2) It doesn't always stop calls from companies who have an existing business arrangement with you (ie. if you bought double glazing from them before, and they want to sell you an upgrade)
3) It doesn't stop the overseas sales and automated calls.
4) There seems to be a distinction between marketing and market research calls. It doesn't seem to stop all market researchers, pollers etc

It has cut down considerably on sales calls to my landline though.

As far as I'm aware, the only way to directly stop automated calls is to contact your phone company, and ask them to block the call you recieved by its number. BT are pretty useless with this though - when I called them about this before, they said they needed me to give them the number in order to block it, so I told them that it was id-blocked, so they'd have to give me the number first... It went round like that for awhile, and it turned out they wouldn't really bother unless I'd got a lot of these calls.

I had noted the number the automated message requested me to call, so I reported that to ICSTIS (http://www.icstis.org.uk/), who later informed me that the company had their license revoked, and had been fined a fairly large sum of money (IIRC £250,000). I like to think I played a small part in that.

Hi all,
Wow, that was a coincident, here I am just signed up having tonnes of these sometimes silent calls.

To put you in the picture, I'm with Virgin Media, I have caller ID and annonymouse caller rejection... registered with TPS and still keep getting them.

The display shows INTERNAT, as I sign up just now for the 5th time today the phone went again.... I picked it up, but this time spoke to a very English Speaking lady. SKY TV so I told her in no uncertain terms if it happens again I will cancel my account.

Gee, I've been going nuts over these, many times I let them ring, many times I picked the phone up and nothing.... then the ol' proverbial tone that tells you they hung up appears.

You know what I'm going to do now.... I'm gonna get right back on to TPS because all they need (I think) is either a number or a company, correct me if I am wrong.

So you have SKY TV then there's this possibility it's them!

This has been going on for months and as I signed up here it all came out in the wash!


Dave

TOP TIP: If you get a silent call, it is a computer trying to find out when you are in, and the best time for a real person to call. So, if you press the has button multiple times in quick succession and then hang up, it assumes there is an error and kicks you out of the system. Bye bye, silent calls!

These silent calls aren't always telemarketers. I was getting several a day, and they were traced back to an unstable inlaw. She was also responsible for several incidents of vandalism, including glueing matchsticks in my door locks so that I had to replace the locks, and posting slugs, etc, through my letter box.
Now if I get more than two of these calls in a day or so I report them directly to the police and let them sort them out.
People should not be complacent about things like this; while they may be just innocent and annoying, they may be more.

As it happens I had a chugger knock on my door earlier on

I'm eating my tea, I might fake interest when walking down the street and I have two minutes to kill just to be nice, but when I'm hungry and my food is getting cold I don't care what your charity is about...

We're signed up with the Telephone Preference Service, which really does make an enormous difference. Our phone number must have leaked out onto some list a few months ago, though, because we were suddenly swamped by calls again.

I've recorded a brief but stern answering machine message stating essentially: "This number is registered with the Telephone Preference Service. Sales and survey calls will not be answered. Otherwise, speak up now." It works wonderfully. Sales callers usually hang up at once, and legitimate callers aren't delayed long.

In fact, the other day I took a call about a medical appointment, and the receptionist thought the message sounded so good she was going to record one herself as soon as she got home!