Most people just put the phone down when they receive a call from a scammer.

Others may say or shout rude things then slam the phone down and some try to convince the scammer to stop their illegal activities.

It doesn’t matter really what you do but you may as well have some fun at the scammer’s expense – after all – she phoned you to steal your money

George suggests – One good way I found was to say “you need to talk to the boss, I’ll just get him” put the phone down and carry in with your work. Come back 10 minutes later and hang up, the line will be dead.  Also, you could say “there’s someone at the door, I’ll just let them in”, put the phone down and hang up 10 minutes later.

Repetition, repetition, repetition.  brush with the law. What I say to scammers (and it works every time) is “can you please hold on for a second?” which they do… then I say “sorry about the wait just had to connect your call with the police… so carry on! What were you saying to me?” Straight away they will put the phone down on you!!!

Stanley says When I can be bothered to answer them, I usually say something along the lines: “How interesting, my husband/son/daughter works for the same company, they can sort it out in the morning. If they have not hung up on me, I’ll carry on with “not knowing what they actually do but it’s something secret which could be to do with investigations”.

It seems work quite well I don’t usually get very far into my tale! I have fun and hopefully they have a few moments of worry.

Ellie said A simple question is the answer. I find that responding to cold callers with “Did l ask you to call me?” has a 90 per cent good result. The phone goes dead or sometimes they respond “no”. One even managed to express his anger with a rather rude expletive.

Harry prefers to Play the easy target. If I am in a playful mood my first comment after their initial spiel is to ask if they would like my bank details? You would be surprised how many reply, “Yes please”!

Take on a new identity. I answered: “City Morgue, please supply number of corpse and date of death.” That worked, no problem.

Anne prefers silence. Once you have picked up the phone, wait for the caller to speak. Normally automated systems kick in on a voice activation which then gets picked up by a person from the calling centre. If you don’t like what you hear just hang up without saying anything. If it’s a genuine caller, they will call you back.

Paul goes for the polite response. With call centres now presenting me with calls several times a week appearing to be from various parts of the UK (and even appearing to be from personal mobiles) I am always polite if I happen, rarely, to answer the call. I realise many of these people are probably working for peanuts under terrible conditions so if they are not scammers, I can tolerate them long enough to say “No thank you. Goodbye.”

David is more confrontational and tries to poke holes in their offer.

Some years ago I was informed that I had won a large amount of money in a competition, but before they could send me the money, I would have to transfer a sum to them to cover transfer and administration costs. I told them how pleased I was and would be happy to pay them – this would be very simple, just deduct the amount from my winnings. They put the phone down.

Andrew Warren, Arundel says Does your mother know?

I once had a scammer call me who seemed really nice but I wasn’t fooled. I asked him if his mother knew what he did for a living and when he replied yes I asked if his mother was proud of him. He told me that his mother was very proud of him, my response to that was that if I were his mother I would be very, very ashamed of him. With that I said goodbye and disconnected the call.

Julie Farr suggests Too much information is a good answer.

Play the scammers at their own game and have a bit of amusement as well. When the opening try-on was “how are you today”, I treated it as a ‘polite’ enquiry.

My response was: “nice of you to ask but I am having a terrible day my haemorrhoids are really causing me a lot of pain and the diarrhoea is dreadful. I haven’t been able to get out for days so it is lovely to get your phone call and I can really talk to someone…”

The conversation ended suddenly as he rang off and never called again.

Have fun

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