Tag: cold calls

Cold Call Surveys

Many companies use surveys of the public – stopping people in shopping centres etc. phoning two weeks after you bought a product from them and asking you to help them fill it in or by email request or cold call and so on.

Often, these are genuine surveys and the person standing in front of you or the caller is paid to get you to reply to their questions and sometimes there is a small reward such as a product tester.

But many cold call surveys are to get information that can be sold on – e.g. if you say you have pets then your name, address, contact details etc. can be sold to any number of pet insurance companies.

So, after the survey you may find yourself bombarded with calls from businesses you don’t want to deal with.

But there are other reasons they call e.g.

  1. They use the information you provide to trick you e.g. with a list of which magazines you subscribe to you may a call claiming one of the magazines subscriptions will end unless you pay immediately.
  2. Giving someone your name, phone number and birthdate can be enough for the scammer to make charges against your phone number
  3. The scammer starts asking survey questions then switches to a hard sell thereby bypassing the laws on cold calling for sales purposes
  4. A reward of some kind e.g. a discount cruise but where you need to pay a small delivery charge and once the scammer has your credit card details they can make any charges against your card they want.

Cold caller surveys may not be what they seem so be careful or just refuse to answer any questions.

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The Worst UK Nuisance Callers

The figures are for one week in 2017 and show the huge volumes of nuisance calls happening.

BT has analysed the data from its call protect service, that lets people block nuisance callers, to generate these statistics.

Number Categories Volume Proportion
1 Accident claims 12,211,599 41%
2 Personal details (Scam) 5,439,781 18.50%
3 PPI 1,892,479 6.40%
4 Computer scam 3,593,103 12.60%
5 Debt collection 2,212,713 7.50%
Other 4,131,102 14%
Total 29,480,477

Cold Callers Answer Machine Detection

answermachine

Even when you’re someone who gets a lot of cold calls, it is very rare to find a cold call on your answer machine.  All of the cold calling companies use computers to dial so how do the computers know the call has been answered by an answer machine rather than by a person?

The dialler computers cannot tell exactly when an answer machine answers the call but they use algorithms to make a judgement.

So, what leads the computer to think the call is answered by a machine?

  1. A person tends to answer the phone with Hello then pause or something like “This is the Johnson residence, Fred speaking” then a pause. Whereas an answer machine tends to have a much longer message with no gaps then the pause.
  2. They can detect the sort of background noise associated with tape based answer machines. All modern answer machines are digital – no tape, hence this method doesn’t really work anymore.
  3. Listening for tones or beeps indicating an answer machine.

The dialler computer judges within a few seconds whether the call has been answered by a person and if not then it cuts the line.

These systems make mistakes and are often the cause of why you may get short silent calls.

There are rules they are supposed to follow to ensure no more than 3% of their calls end up in silent calls but whether any of them follow that rule – who knows. Some people say that if you suspect a cold call – then press the # symbol repeatedly and it will screw up the answer machine detection – but I don’t know if that’s true.

If it turns out to be someone you know calling they’ll just assume it was noise on the line and will wait for you to say Hello.

Nuisance Callers Will be Forced to Display Number

Ministers hope to force through a change in the law within months to stop cold-call companies using unlisted numbers.

These companies will be forced to provide a valid caller ID that shows up on the recipients handset or face fines of up to £500,000. Baroness Neville-Rolfe, the minister for data protection, said that mandatory caller ID is another step as part of a closely coordinated effort with regulators, industry and consumer groups to tackle the problem.

The proposed regulation is under consultation and if approved is expected to be enforced from April.