Has anyone else noticed a surge in the number of nuisance calls / cold calls since the start of this year?

I am very careful about giving out my phone number. If I have to give it for a legitimate reason I am always careful never to opt in to giving permission for my number to be used for future marketing etc, and always to opt out where I need to. Inevitably I got the odd nuisance call but in the past few months it has become ridiculous – I’m being contacted on my mobile several times per day at times.

I don’t know where this sudden surge has come from and it really makes me very irritated! Perhaps I should just hang up but the number of lies they appear to tell and how keen they are to make things my fault and avoid apologising, really makes me cross. I have had people pretending to be from my phone provider, pretending to be from Experian,  telling me they can’t take my number off their records, and most ridiculously yesterday, telling me that they don’t have a telephone number, don’t know who their manager is and don’t know where they themselves work or what their address is. I kid you not…. I even had someone calling me a “silly cow” and launching into further verbal aggression because I asked them not to call again. It’s quite unbelievable. The effect these calls must have on more vulnerable people could be huge, given the length of deception they are willing to go to.

Given that they are prepared to tell any number of lies, even to withholding their name and their company’s address and telephone number, they are able to leave the recipients of their calls powerless to stop the inconvenience. When I worked at a hospital, we received similar calls there too. They became so numerous we investigated whether the switchboard could block the nuisance numbers. We found out that they had tried and been unable to. The calls were even coming into phones in the A & E department, blocking lines on phones that should have been reserved for paramedics to call ahead when bringing trauma cases to the emergency room (after road traffic accidents etc)! And even when informed of this,  the companies failed to remove the numbers from their databases. How could they possibly think that was okay? (Moreover how did they ever get the numbers in the first place?)

Anyhow. That’s my rant over for the day, I promise!

Ginny xxx

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