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.