Deb Bassett - Urbanwide

Reducing your phone spam?

I’m sure we’re not the only ones blessed with receiving unsolicited phone calls from abroad, almost daily. Personally I’m fed up with them interrupting my flow of work. The thing is, we’re registered with the Telephone Preference Service, and have been for years, so this should not be happening. Up until yesterday, we hadn’t really done much about it, but after receiving a call that was “the straw that broke the camel’s back”, we realised we should be reporting these people, otherwise how else can the TPS make these annoying people go away? So I wanted to give a quick summary of the stuff I’d found out about complaining to the TPS and receiving calls from abroad:

Information you need to get off the person calling you so you can make a TPS complaint:
Company Name, Name of the person who spoke to you, Company telephone number, Company address, Company postcode, County, Email.

Companies ringing from abroad on behalf of a UK company must comply with TPS:
From the web site “Companies based abroad who call into the UK and who are making calls on behalf of a UK based company, must comply with UK regulations and screen their call lists against TPS before making an unsolicited sales and marketing call to a UK telephone number.”

Market research calls are not prevented by TPS:
“Market research calls are not covered in the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 therefore companies conducting these types of calls are still allowed to call a TPS registered number. If you do not want to receive such calls, inform the caller to remove your details from their call lists.”