The journalist Victoria Bischoff was plagued by cold callers and wanted to find out how they had got her contact details. She started to investigate but didn’t expect it would take so much time and effort and that the result would involve so many organisations.

She started receiving cold calls to her mobile phone, including from Scottish Power and also lots of spam emails from companies she had never heard of.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws give you the right to ask where these companies get your contact details from, so she started making that request (called a subject access request).

e.g. one request led her to Prize Reactor then to The Secret For You then to Response Concepts then to Green Flamingo who then claimed she had entered a prize draw at 5:20 am one morning, so she knew this to be false.  The data that Green Flamingo had on her was all wrong except for the email address and mobile number.

Green Flamingo claimed by entering the prize draw she had agreed for her contact details to be sold to other companies.

All lies.

There is more to the story – but you can guess that unscrupulous organisations collect email addresses and phone numbers from websites, directories – anywhere they can get them and then add on guessed information such as which house number to match with a postcode.

By this means, information that is partly true and partly made-up circulates among businesses wanting to make money from your details or to send out emails, make cold calls etc.

It is time-consuming and difficult to track down how this happens as Victoria found out.

Don’t give out your personal information to any organisation or website or on social media unless you are sure it is safe. Even this doesn’t keep you safe though as many times these unscrupulous people simply find some information about you online and make-up the rest then sell it.

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.