Bagel Belly Blog

Worse than failure

I've started to receive spam phone calls on my mobile.

The modus operandi is as follows: the phone rings, displaying a blocked number. When I answer, after a brief pause a recorded sales pitch kicks in, prompting me at various intervals to press a number to hear more about their services. If you press the number, you're put through to a well-trained call handler scripted in selling, but also trained to give no details out about the company they are working for.

The first time it happened, yesterday, they told me they got my number from a marketing database. My number shouldn't be on any marketing database. I told them to remove my number from their list and not to call me ever again (after trying to find out everything I could about them).

This evening, they called again, interrupting my dinner. I can't ignore blocked numbers - sometimes overseas numbers or office numbers are blocked, so it could be friends, family, or work calling me. This time the person I talked to gave out no information at all about the company, other than a bogus name that comes up with no hits in the Companies House database or on Google. When asked for a phone number I could call them on, I was told it was an outbound sales centre with no incoming number, but that a manager could call me back. Needless to say, that hasn't happened.

This is a serious problem for me, as I'm often travelling, and when overseas I pay the bulk of the call charges when I receive a call. Even if it's only a few seconds, it quickly adds up, and this is the worst possible type of abusive marketing: spam you have to pay for.

Sadly, the law is woefully inadequate in this area. Ofcom, the toothless independent regulator that's little more than an industry front, recommends signing up to the Telephone Preference Service. Useful, except I signed up when it first launched, and the website confirms my mobile number is still registered with them.

Next up, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), who enforce and oversee the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, amongst other things. What do they say? See Ofcom. Or, if I think the regulations have been breached, write to the organisation that breached them. Yes, the same marketing organisation that phoned me up twice, refusing to provide any contact details whatsoever, certainly not a postal address.

What else can the ICO do? They can ask (or even order) the organisation to follow the law, assuming I can identify them. But they cannot punish an organisation that ignores them.

So, basically, there's no one to stop these people, no way to stop these people, and no way to punish these people. I have a suspicion the future of mobile is whitelisting phone calls. That's just crazy.

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