Nuisance caller attempts increasing again

[dennis]

How are you going to enforce UK laws on overseas companies?

[Jethro_uk]

I quite agree.

Now find a way to enforce it.

[Steve Walker]

The law may say that, but the phone calls, still say something like, "Press 8 to be removed from our database" and when over a period of 6 or

7 weeks, you have received 10 phonecalls from the same company and don't have a tone dial on the phone you are answering with, it gets damned annoying!

I could have left it off the hook and gone and grabbed another phone, but my wife has a long term illness, the phone was in the bedroom (ringer off) and she was asleep, with the light off and I didn't want to wake her in finding it quickly.

SteveW

[Mark]

If the company does business here then they must have a UK presence, yes? Therefore fines could be imposed for breaching UK laws.

[Steve Walker]

They know it is a valid number simply because the line has rung, they don't even need someone to answer, never mind press a button, to prove its validity.

SteveW

[Scott]

Depends what you mean by 'do business'. If they have a branch or office in the UK, I agree with you but if they are based abroad and phoning UK numbers, I don't see how that would work. You can't get somebody extradited for an alleged crime that took place outside the jurisdiction. By that logic, if someone used a clone of my credit card in Hong Kong, they could be brought to court and prosecuted in the UK. How would that work? Extraordinary rendition?

[Dave Plowman (News)]

But can you update your caller list via the web using your computer keyboard or by copying text? Doing it on a phone keypad can be a PITA.

[Scott]

Never tried it but I'm told 'I'd like you to know that I'm not wearing any knickers' works quite well.

[Steve Walker]

The calls are usually from overseas call centres that do not fall under UK law, but they are gathering customers for UK companies to actually sell goods or services. Simply extend the law to cover that by fining the companies in the UK for each call made on their behalf.

SteveW

[Steve Walker]

How many nuisance calls have you received where the services or goods being offered are being advertised for a company that does not have a UK presence? I've not had one. They have all been for double glazing, new boilers, new kitchens, accident compensation, etc., where there is a clear UK presence that is simply using overseas call centres to get around the UK laws.

SteveW

[Mike Clarke]

[snip]

It does however mean that they know that the number is one where the call likely to be picked up by a human. This might increase its value when sold on.

[Bob Eager]

I ask them what colour knickers they are wearing (if female). Otherwise I ask them the colour of their boyfriend's knickers.

[Tim+]

Why would you want to? With the BT 8500 a couple of key presses will add someone to your white list. Ditto a couple of presses to add to your black list. Anyone not blacklisted or whitelisted goes to answerphone. That?s more than adequate cold call blocking for 99% of folk. I speak as someone who has a redundant Truecall unit.

Tim

[Vir Campestris]

My wife got one the other day. He wanted to know how many blue lights were on the router. "None. They're green" she replied. He rang off.

(actually the router _does_ have blue lights, but she must have looked at the modem)

Andy

[Jac Brown]

But the call centers don't.

[Jac Brown]

Not if they are employed to do the call center work.

You can impose anything you like, but there is no way of making them pay that fine.

[Harry Bloomfield]

Dave Plowman (News) used his keyboard to write :

Not really, you key in the numbers in the first instance to ring them, the only extra effort is adding the name. If a regular caller should ring me, I just save the number and give it a name. I rarely add any to my call book, so minimal effort.

[Steve Walker]

The point is that in virtually every case, they are calling ON BEHALF OF a UK based company (there'd be no point in a non-UK company offering to fit a new kitchen for instance) and the law needs to cover the UK based company that has contracted the overseas call centre to make the calls for them.

SteveW

[The Natural Philosopher]

Unfortunately that doesnt make jack shit of difference.

Renewable UK lies through its teeth and makes false claims and lobbies the government using false information, on behalf of all its members who are nearly all UK companies, but it cant be held to account becaus it is POLITICAL.

Using arms length companies to do dirty deals... is standard practice.

And buying dodgy goods from people you didn't explicitly set up is even more so

"We bought what we thought was a proper legally obtained mailing list her honner!"

Plausible deniability.

Once my comany was approached by "Siemens". well they said they were Siemens, and they were registereed in SWITZERLAND as Siemens Switzerland

- to supply some Cisco routers.

Why I asked my business parmner, didnt they go straight to Cisco? And who were Siemens, Switzerland anyway?

Then the penny dropped as my S African apartheid experiuence kicked in. These Ciscos were for someone under US embargo. Iran probably. And their credentials might fool a little greedy company, but not Cisco. The company was a deliberate fake setup to facilitate this. Whether uit was a genuine subsidiary of Siemens as they claimed, or not, I never discovered.

There was no profit in it anyway, so we told them to f*ck off.

[John Rumm]

No. What kind of business presence does a scammer require in the UK to carry out scams by phone here?

I can sure a scam outfit in Kolkata will be quaking in its boots. Lets just hope they are not the kind of naughty people who would not pay a fine! (assuming you can identify who they are)

One form of direct action you can take here, is to identify the VoIP operator that is providing call termination services in the UK and get them to remove or block their accounts. This is something that they tend to do fairly regularly anyway, since the scammers quite often avoid paying them, and they are also quite responsive to fraud reports.

However there are hundreds of providers to choose from and the scammers will just rotate through new ones every so often, making sure they always have a handful of working services available to use.