Me and my wife work nights, and short of unplugging the phone line which I don't really want to do there seems to be no way of stopping these god damn insects calling us constantly. Just the other day we were woken up 9 times by these sales calls.

Now i called virgin to see if there was anything that can be done to stop them and i put on anonymous caller rejection which until now I didn't realise only worked within the UK (what a total waste of time) And according to them the TPS cannot stop them either. Is there anything that can be done to stop them? i mean comon are we living in the dark ages or what. How do these company's even get our ex dir number in the first place.

TPS can do something if the companies are in the UK or working on behalf of a UK company. But if the calls are being made on behalf of a non-UK company from outside the UK then there is not a lot they can do.

The reason Anonymous Caller Reject it only works in the UK is that it detects a completely blank CLI which may not be the case if the call originates overseas even though the actual number may not get through. And of course many private switchboards let you put any old number in the CLI field which would get round the bar without identifying the caller either.

As for how they get your number. They just guess in effect. Their systems just dial any old number they think is legitimate. A lot of them might end up going nowhere but many will dial a real number. And if they are using one of these systems you can bet the operators don't give a monkeys about your privacy, ie whether you are ex-directory or registered with TPS or anything like that.

so basically there is nothing i can do?

Short of buying an automatic call screener, there's very little you can do against these nuisance international call centres.

My parents got fed up with the phone ringing up to five times a day (including weekends) and ended up buying one of these:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/TrueCall-Plu...4746572&sr=8-1

It's expensive, but they haven't been hassled by a single telesales call since.

yeah saw that thing on dragons den, it is rather pricey though cant afford that with a baby on ze way..oh well just have to unplug the phone

I could be tempted to buy one of those if it was just a bit less expensive.

One thing I would like to know is whether caller ID is passed through the unit when a call is allowed straight through because it's on the "friends" list of numbers.

Even though I would know it was OK to pick up the phone I would still like to know who is calling.

Yes it does (just tried it myself). I think it also puts through the caller ID of non-friendlist numbers as well so that you get an idea of who's calling without having to pick up the phone.

Yeah, the Truecall's pretty expensive (I'll be buying one when I move out eventually though) and Amazon's actually the cheapest we came across, but not having to put up with annoying foreign call centres, autodiallers and British Gas trying to flog us a new boiler every five minutes is definitely worth it!



Might be something to consider when you don't want your baby waking up five times a day

Really, the government and the so-called EU should be doing something about this seeing as these calls almost always originate from places like Spain.

Sounds like they've thought of everything with this design.

I'm getting really sick of the several calls a day that come up as "international". We tried answering them and asking them to stop calling which helped for a while but now they are on the increase again and the answerphone deals with most of them.
It would be nice to have a quiet peaceful automated system which gave them the runaround on our behalf.