23 April 2013

Silent calls from 01612127801

Recently I've been getting a lot of silent calls from 01612127801.  Silent as in when I answer there's just silence on the line for several seconds then a voice says "Goodbye!"  This I gather is what happens when a company uses an automatic dialer to call numbers.  Basically to minimise delay and not have their agents listening to dial tones whilst waiting for someone to answer the automatic dialer calls and waits for the person to pick up then assigns the call to the next available agent.  If there's no agent available it hangs up.

As I recall John Hemming MP had a bit of campaign against these some years ago.  I am writing to him to see if this campaign is still on going or might start up again.

This is the same as was happening most of the times I got calls from 01618149905 which turned out to be 'Versatile' trying to sell PPI claim assistance, when there was finally someone to take the call at their end.  Even the voice saying 'GoodBye!' sounds the same.  So what are the odds of two different companies, both in Manchester, both calling the same number (which has been registered with the TPS pretty much since I got it) with an automaic dialer and both not having enough staff to handle their automatically dialed calls?

This new number seems to be quite new, when I googled it I could only find one site that listed it and that only had four entries going back just under 2 weeks.  But I did find a page on WhoCallsMe about this number.

ETA:  had a response from John Hemming.  He said he'd have someone look into it and confirmed it's OFCOM's responsibility to deal with silent calls.

ETAA: Had a response from the person John Hemming had asked to look into this.  They said that they had spoken to OFCOM who had said that as they have no details of who that number belongs to they can't do anything about it. I'd had a similar response direct from OFCOM as a result of my contacting them directly.

22 April 2013

Nuisance call from 08435600125

Just had a call.  Guy identified himself as being from 'Pension Aid' and said it wasn't a sales call, he then asked me if I was aware of the 'pension crisis'.  I explained that I was but as I was in a final salary scheme to which I was making 18% of gross salary contributions I should be OK.  He agreed I should be OK and said he'd update my records.  I asked for a 'Do Not Call' note to be put on my records.

Number has been on TPS for over 10 years.  Submitted complaint to TPS.  Suggest others do the same if they have calls from this number or similar: https://complaints.tpsonline.org.uk/Consumer/