And another scam :TPS of all things..

I have just had a call purporting to be from The Telephone Preference Service to which I belong and it was quite obviously from a call centre in the Philippines .

The man asked me if I was still getting nuisance calls to which I replied ''Yes and you are one of them, get lost ''

They always ring at meal times I guess in the hope of catching more people at home ....

It's this lot

https://www.saga.co.uk/magazine/mone...e-service-scam

Re: And another scam :TPS of all things..

Ha Ha Ha That made me laugh, I'd have loved to have seen his face,
But yes they are a real pain..

Re: And another scam :TPS of all things..

Good one Meg, I like it.

Re: And another scam :TPS of all things..

I don't have a lot of good things to say about Talk Talk, but they have a really good system for stopping unwanted calls.

Any numbers you have accepted calls from, in the last 30 days, are put on your acceptable list, but if any come from any other number they have to say who they are before they are put through, on the first call. You then have the option to put them on you accepted list, just accept the current call, or prevent any further calls from that number.

Since I started using this service, I haven't had any calls from marketing companies or scammers!

Re: And another scam :TPS of all things..

I wonder how much we are paying, though our taxes, for the TPS.

We are registered with them and continue to get junk telephone calls. They are a useless drain on our finances.

Re: And another scam :TPS of all things..

As i understand it, they can only fix UK based callers.

Many of the Cold Callers are outside the UK.

Re: And another scam :TPS of all things..

Indeed. So why bother?

If I wanted to bombard people with telephone scams, I'd set up a foreign call centre. Workers are cheap and, apparently, so are international calls from the right location.

The best way to deal with these money-grabbers is to install software on our phones to deny access to any numbers not recognised.

Alternatively, as I do, buy an answerphone and let the bugger ring. If you recognise the caller, pick up. If you don't, ignore it. It is quick and easy to periodically delete all the nuisance calls recorded.

Re: And another scam :TPS of all things..

Well done Meg, and thanks for telling us.

Re: And another scam :TPS of all things..

Hi all

Yes to clarify the TPS, it's largely useless because it only applied to UK companies. As soon as TPS came around the nuisance call companies simply set up shop off-shore and continued their incessant cold calling. The same would apply to any EU based TPS system, companies will just operate outside Europe.

For some years a number of phone providers, including of course BT, have been operating what can only be deemed a "protection racket". Instead of simply blocking nuisance calls before they ever get to you and instead of giving you free access to the facility that provides the caller's number (Caller ID) they have instead milked the market and took advantage of people by charging for Caller ID services, whether as a direct additional charge or bundled into a wider service plan.

These providers have acted despicably and gotten away with it for years.

Ofcom is now putting an end to all that.

There is now a deadline which is the 1st October 2018. At that point ALL providers will be mandated to provide Caller ID services for free and will be required to automatically block known nuisance numbers as well as a few other things.

This has been a long time coming.

Regardless, the problem will still remain that people will end up having to create and maintain "blocked number lists" which is both a faff and will still ultimately lead to problems.

Earlier poster here says Talktalk provide the facility to block up to 150 numbers. Really when you think about it, that's not a great deal. Many people get 4 or 5 nuisance calls per day so you're going to fill up that 150 allocation pretty fast.

The wider problem is that by answering any of these calls to see who it is, will see you marked in the databases as a viable cold call target, and that is something you definitely don't want.

ONLY by steadfastly refusing to pick up the phone will you be able to get yourself off those databases and flagged as a "useless number".

This is the foolproof way to beat this whole situation.

Don't answer the phone. When it stops ringing do 1471 to see what the number is. If you recognise it as friends/family then ring them back, no problem.

Otherwise, just leave it be.

If you have Caller ID already then I guess the same applies. If you recognise the number, answer, otherwise just don't answer.

Eventually the cold callers will mark you in their computer system as no-one home or bad number etc. Then the number of calls you receive will very quickly drop off to almost nothing.

Re: And another scam :TPS of all things..

Just to add a bit more to what Realist is saying, I spent a lot of time, a few years ago , trying to find out how spammers are getting through into my email accounts.

I thought that I had all these blocked because I'd gone to the servers to set them up to block a number of Dating & Porn addresses which I didn't want.

They weren't all blocked, I found after much investigation, because the spammers had all signed up with the Company I was using for my emails, at that time. They couldn't block what they were being paid to carry!

If you see what I mean!