Sick of cold calls interrupting your life? One man has taken up extreme measures and is now actually making money from the pests!
As I field my third unwanted, unsolicited and definitely unloved call from Italy in a day, I think of the chap from Leeds who has both fended off some cold calling and made money from others by turning his home into an 0871 phone zone.
According to the BBC, in November 2011 Lee Beaumont was so fed up with phone pests flogging everything from solar panels to the inevitable PPI reclaims that he came up with a radical idea. Like me, he works from home so he was subject to an almost non-stop barrage.
He paid £10 (plus VAT) to set up an 0871 number line in his property. Each call to this phone costs 10p a minute from a landline and substantially more from a mobile. And he gets to keep 7p from each 10p. So far, nearly two years later, he has made £300 – that's the equivalent of around three full days of cold calls.
He has kept his standard Leeds number for friends and family but puts the 0871 on forms which ask for a home number. Some of these firms use 0871, which is not included in any landline phone bundle, themselves. And he is always willing to offer his email address to what might be described as “carefully selected” organisations.
Keeping them talking
Now he has an incentive to keep people talking as long as he can – he can amuse himself watching his earnings click up by £4.20 an hour.
My personal amusement is to ask cold callers, usually from India, who phone with so-called “market surveys” if they have an appointment. When they question the need for this – cold callers can be nothing if not arrogant – I tell them that “the doctor is very busy and only has limited time to deal with phone enquiries”. I sometimes ask for their postcode so I can “check whether they are entitled to treatment”.
Some hang up. Others continue, so depending on my mood I may ask “Where is the itching?” (that, and I know this is bad, is my “sexually transmitted disease” doctor persona).
[SPOTLIGHT]Or sometimes I pose as a psychologist asking questions about their mental health. To those who respond that they are conducting a “survey”, I reply that “believing you work in a call centre is a frequent symptom of an extreme delusional state”. The more they protest, the more I suggest courses of self-help or the need to take serious medication.
The watchdog must do more
Phone Pay Plus, which regulates 0871 and other premium numbers, says Beaumont's idea should not be copied. But the watchdog could do more to control these numbers.
But what is amazing with Beaumont is that cold callers keep on calling, though it is now less than half the 30 calls a week he used to receive.
Cold calling from claims management companies – mostly injury and PPI – has declined over the past year although it is still a major annoyance, according to Citizens Advice. Its survey found that two-thirds of those asked had received unwanted calls, texts, emails or letters about PPI mis-selling, with more than half saying that they had been contacted more than 10 times in the past year.
The most angry were those whose evening meals had been disturbed by these nuisance calls.
Citizens Advice did not record whether they were eating pasta, pizza or some other Italian food.
But my Italian cold callers definitely were interested in my culinary habits.
I was asked if I liked olive oil, parma ham and Italian cheeses. Well I do. There then followed a lengthy discourse on how I could buy “artisanal” quality foods which were guaranteed not to contain preservatives.
After the first call – around 10am – I looked at what I assumed to be the firm's website. Yes, it had lots of yummy items and although they were hardly cheap, I might have bought some in an unpressured environment.
But the next call – about 1.30pm – which said I had discussed food with them a week ago (wrong!) was enough to put me off my pizza, while the third call of the day – around 5pm – was enough to make me throw up my tortellini. Some report getting up to 20 calls a week from this Italian firm.
This is not a scam – the amounts are too small and the costs are not that much different from a good local shop. The methods used, however, are annoying and counter-productive. And forget Telephone Preference Service which is supposed to weed out cold calls. It is largely non-effective and never was any protection against overseas phone pests.