COLD CALLS

[Stanley]

I agree with Peter, it's a blast from the past! Next thing you'll be getting advice on penis enlargement.....

[PanBiker]

Landline rang, pre recorded message, "Hello this is your bank, we have noticed two unusual transactions on your credit card. One for £199.00 for Amazon and a second for an unknown supplier for £879.00". "select 1 to talk to us and confirm your account details and these deductions".

I think not although they got one supplier correct as I ordered a new bread proving basket from Amazon, it was £8.50

You can see how some folk would get scammed with this. Automated so they only need to get a few hits a day to harvest card details from the unwary. One cold call every couple of minutes adds up to a lot of calls. if they only get one positive hit an hour, that's a lot of data and potential grief. The auto servers probably take advantage of world time zones, so can probably run 24/7/365.

[Stanley]

It's a bugger isn't it. All these crooked sods trying to defraud us and basically nothing can be done to stop them apart from personal vigilance.
I am not technical and so keep it simple. If I don't know the origin of any message, no matter how it is sent, I delete it. End of!

[Tizer]

Fibre to the house hasn't reached us yet and we still have a landline phone. Now we're getting calls every few days that start `Hi, I'm [insert name] your energy adviser...'. We just end the call immediately and then block the number. I'm sure they think anyone with an old type phone is going to be easy to scam.

[PanBiker]

My landline phone is now plugged into the VOIP socket on the fibre router. I can still use it if I want but it has gone rather dumb on the display since I knocked the "Free UK calls package" that I paid for on the head. That in itself was a bit of a misnomer! Killing it has also disabled the caller ID and call barring options but I can say that since I knocked it on the head we have had a lot fewer incoming cold calls. Outgoing calls are now about 28p a minute so we don't use it for that as we both have mobiles and I get 100 free calls for my £5 a month deal. Sally's mobile is on contract and she has a similar amount of freebies.

[Big Kev]

My landline phone is now plugged into the VOIP socket on the fibre router. I can still use it if I want but it has gone rather dumb on the display since I knocked the "Free UK calls package" that I paid for on the head. That in itself was a bit of a misnomer! Killing it has also disabled the caller ID and call barring options but I can say that since I knocked it on the head we have had a lot fewer incoming cold calls. Outgoing calls are now about 28p a minute so we don't use it for that as we both have mobiles and I get 100 free calls for my £5 a month deal. Sally's mobile is on contract and she has a similar amount of freebies.

We did the same with the landline contract (no full fibre here yet though). We use our mobiles for outgoing calls but have to use Voice over WiFi while indoors (mobile signal is appalling here). We have a joint mobile contract with O2, unlimited calls and texts and 4GB of data, we also have a discounted Amazon Prime 'bolt on'. We did keep the caller ID, with the landline, and the call screening. The caller ID is £1 a month.

[Stanley]

When I got full fibre I just ditched the landline phone. End of! I get more free calls than I ever use with my £1 a week arrangement with EE