Your view: all hung up on nuisance calls and texts

I am so tired of nuisance calls and texts. I especially worry because my youngest child ( a mid-teenager) is autistic and doesn’t always know if calls are genuine or not. When they first began she thought they hung up because it was her fault!
Now when there is a call that comes from an unknown number I answer in a different language or pick up but say nothing – just giving them their own medicine – if they want to waste their money let them but they’re not ruining my life in the process. I will be the one smiling when they go down the pan.

i like every one else fed up with nuisance phone calls my brother who lives on his own in accomodation gets a lot of phone calls also a huge phone bill he has speech problems and every time he he gets phone calls he rings me to see if i have rang him and so it goes on it is upsetting for him as he doesnt no who it is so the sooner this is seen to the better it is worrying for the old people especially when there is nobody at the other end

I pay for caller display on a BT landline and have a number of friends and relatives in France. Calls from France come up on caller display as ‘UNAVAILABLE’ and I am forced to pick-up all such calls and of course a significant proportion turn out to be nuisance calls.

Can anybody with telecoms expertise explain why international calls cannot be processed/conditioned such that they activate caller display as for local calls ie identify the caller as attributed in my phone’s directory?

With this functionality I could then adopt the strategy of letting any ‘unknown caller’ to pass through to the answer machine. If the unknown caller had important info to impart then presumably they would take the time to leave a message. Cold callers and automated calls are probably programmed to terminate the call if an answering machine is detected and anyway to get you to call back they’d have to identify themselves.

I could scream with frustration at the number of nuisance calls I get – despite being registered with “Telephone Preferences”. Apart from the usual PPI mis-selling, and solar heating companies, I had a car accident 3 years ago (cash for crash!) and was bombarded by claim companies urging me to sue for personal injury … which I didn’t have! They were persistent, and I’d like to know how they got my telephone number …. logically, it must stem from the insurance company! Another irritation is the “just doing research …” ploy. I’ve actually reach the stage where I’m being abusive before slamming down the ‘phone! Please, please, make them go away!

I seem, now, having been TPS registered for years, to finally have almost stopped getting sales calls from the UK (and any I do still get I give very short shrift & report them to TPS) But this week the number of calls I’ve had from overseas numbers has increased dramatically – several a day – and of course these are the ones that I can’t do ANYTHING about – partly because they’re overseas but also because they’re “surveys”, so are exempt from any guidelines.
Heartily, deeply fed up having just taken ANOTHER one, at 7.30 in the evening, from someone very pushy who wanted to offer me a “free survey to save you money”.
And prior to this round of overseas calls, it was endless recorded messages about PPI/debt management etc. Aaaaaaarrgghhhh!!!!!

I had over 20 calls yesterday; one from Sky, which I didn’t want, but at least I am actually signed up with the company; and the rest from India, doing the old ‘something wrong with your computer’ routine. I said I wasn’t interested and hung up; they rang back immediately; this was repeated for several goes. Later in the day, it all started again. I said I didn’t have Windows; they rang back and said ‘something wrong with your Linux machine’. I switched the answerphone on for a while. Later it all started again, so I let them have the rape alarm down the mouthpiece (I seem to have lost my whistle) for a minute and hung up. Guess what? They rang straight back… The phone’s ringing NOW this minute… yep: India calling, third time today (so far).

Is there nothing that can be done about the overseas calls? I bet the Indian government would be complaining to the Foreign Office if the UK was bombarding Indian homes with nuisance calls!

And why, BTW, should the UK telephone suppliers be allowed to collude? As far as I can tell, they are all making a nice packet out of add-ons such as ‘Anonymous Caller Reject’ and ‘Choose to refuse’, which cost more than double the amount of extras like ‘Caller Display’, but presumably are still a simple automated system… These services should be available FREE and provided AS STANDARD. They should NOT be treated as luxuries.