This happens to everyone very occasionally – usually someone dialled a wrong number and realised and put the phone down or didn’t recognise the voice answering your phone.

But, this can be a regular occurrence and then the reasons are more concerning.

Automated Calling Systems

A lot of marketing companies and scammers use automated diallers i.e. computers that call people in turn on a list then pass the calls onto to call centre staff.. To maximise use of their staff, they set the diallers to call numerous people at the same time in the hope that at least some will answer the phone and those get put through to operatives.

However, this method also means many people will get silent calls when all operatives are already on the line to other people.

These calls can be hard to spot in advance because the scammers often hide or spoof the calling number i.e. make it look as if a different number such as a government number.

Overseas Cold Callers

It might sound expensive for scammers to call you from overseas, but the vast majority of such calls are now from other countries and they use VOIP i.e. let their computer make the call without incurring phone call charges.

The major phone networks in the UK have agreed to automatically block almost all internet calls coming from abroad if they pretend to be from UK numbers.

This should result in millions of calls from abroad being stopped, but so far only Talk Talk has implemented this.

Criminals have been using internet-based calling technology to make it look like a phone call or text is coming from a real telephone number – often one based in the country they are targeting.

We’ll see when the other networks start to block these criminals.