Hello,

Recently, I've been getting strange calls on my landline phone. The number shows up as "UNAVAIL" on caller ID and when I answer, it's silent for ten seconds or so and then hangs up. If I say "hello?", it hangs up immediately as I talk, as if it's checking whether I'm here or not. The bizarre thing is that the calls are at least five times daily, starting at about 8am and finishing around 9pm. It's not a with-held number; they show up as "PRIVATE".

Does anyone know what it is? I presume it's some particularly persistent sales team with a badly set-up cold calling system, but the regularity and the content-free nature of the calls makes me want to report it to BT as a nuisance caller. Just wondered if anyone was having the same issue; if I go to BT with the scant information I have now, they'll ignore me.

If you get in touch with BT they will probably point you in the direction of TPS

If you register with them then cold calling should stop (but it can take about a month to go through)

That site also has a phone number to call if you are being bugged by silent calls


Obviously this is presuming that it is a company calling you and not someone just being a jerk.


[edit] Just to add to that, I did suffer with these calls for qte a while before getting in touch with BT. They put me in touch with TPS and there has been a definite improvement.

I am over in Canada at the moment and this is a definite problem here as well. From what I have found out... is that an automated system calls your number from a database. The system waits to detect a human voice. Then it routes the call to the next available agent for the sell job. The trouble is that, the computer often out runs the number of available agents. Thus you end up with dead air and a dropped line if no agent takes over the line within a set time. Then the system notes a failed call and puts you back in the queue. I used to get five a day from one company out of Montreal in particular until Canada implicated a TPS type system.

These days, if you receive any unsolicited calls, you only have to say "Please remove my number from your calling lists.". They have 24 hours. Anymore calls from that point on is a $500 fine to the company. I routinely use this method and now I might get one call a week from companies instead of twenty.

tc80 is correct, 'silent calls' are computer generated calls made by a computer. The computer rings numbers for a call centre. When a member of the call centre is free they will answer it, if none become free the computer hangs up and keeps ringing other numbers.

Isn't it disgusting that this practice was not legislated out of existance the moment the first a***hole tried it?