Nuisance calls are an almost accepted part of everyday life, just as much as receiving junk mail through your letterbox. However, junk mail is considered less intrusive in that you can simply recycle any items, whereas with nuisance calls you could inadvertently be talking to a high-pressure salesperson or scammer.
I tend to ignore calls from numbers that I don’t recognise, but, for many people, ignoring the phone isn’t an option – especially when they might need to be contactable in an emergency situation.
If you are fed up of getting those pesky unsolicited spam and scam calls to your home phone, here are some weird and wonderful ways of dealing with them; all of these methods have been tried and tested by myself and other people!
Make your landline ex-directory
By default, whenever you get a landline, your telephone number is publicly available in your local phone book.
Legitimate marketers are not allowed to contact you by phone unless you have given them permission to do so. But despite those legal obligations, you will often get unscrupulous callers contacting you simply by finding your number in the phone book!
Making your landline number ex-directory is normally free of charge, and is one less way to minimise the amount of nuisance calls that you receive on a daily basis.
Don’t agree to having your details sold to others
A lot of big companies make some extra cash on the side by selling your contact details to organisations they called their “partners.” In reality, they are simply firms that buy data as long as the contacts have agreed to be contacted by third parties.
Whenever you sign up for anything, whether it is company news or service updates, make sure you choose the appropriate options that say you do not want to be contacted by other organisations.
Additionally, you can also sign up to the free Telephone Preference Service to prevent being contacted by other organisations further down the chain.
Use a whistle down the phone
A trick that people are often told to do when they receive abusive calls is to use a whistle down the phone whenever an unwanted call is received.
There are no guarantees that the above action will prevent them from contacting you in the future, but it will certainly make you feel good at the time!
Buy a call blocker
Of course, you could always use the technological approach to nuisance call blocking and just buy a device that helps to filter out legitimate and spam/scam calls! Call blockers are small, inexpensive devices that sit between your telephone socket and your telephone.
Some are automatically programmed to block withheld, unavailable and international phone calls, whereas others have a bypass facility to avoid accidentally blocking genuine callers from specific numbers.
There are also some telephones that you can buy which offer the same facility, such as the BT 6500 range of cordless phones.
Mute your home phone
If the only reason you have a landline is because you need it for broadband Internet access, you can always permanently mute your landline phone! Alternatively, you could just disconnect your home phone from the landline, and only use it when you need to check for any line problems.