Fies Fees

Well, its a sorry state of affairs when I only come to update this blog to whine, but after writing a post a little while back about cold callers I have had yet more trouble. This time from loan sharks and bogus debt companies.

I have no idea how they got my number but I have been receiving several calls per day on some days, mostly automated calling machines. Phone spam!

When I have spoken to them they got quite pushy with me, and after that, when I just say Im not interested they become quite rude. These people are clearly con merchants, or at the very least are unethical.

One company kept calling me calling themselves “Debt Advice UK”. I checked what I thought was their website only to find they already had a notice up saying that they do not cold call, and that it is a case of mistaken identity!

Clearly it is not only the recipients of the calls that are feeling the pain of this, though, with websites these days its sometimes hard to figure out who is who.

As it happens, on the same website I just noticed they actually have a post on how the CAB are launching some kind of bid to reign in debt advisers and loan companies who cold call in this way.

That article suggests that the CAB are specifically targetting companies that cold call regarding financial products, so, hopefully this particular gripe will go away.

Unfortunately, I think that other companies will step into the void.

In fact, a friend of mine had a call from what looked like a UK number only last week, those guys told her they were from Microsoft and that her PC was infected, they got her to install some kind of remote viewing software so they could control her PC, took her to a payment page and tried to get her to put in her credit card details! Supposedly that is another quite common cold calling trick, and the numbers are not really UK numbers but people in India using Skype numbers (which are 10 a penny apparently)!

In fact, a quick google found me this article from the Guardian on the very same scam, that is around 8 months old, so I guess they still have not been able to stop the problem.

Anyway, Ill try to make my next post less rant and something a little more interesting!

I don’t know whether it’s just me, but I seem to be getting more and more cold callers ringing at strange times. Getting a cold call from someone in India in the middle of a work day is annoying enough, but it’s difficult to be polite to someone when they ring at 9am on a Sunday morning! This was a one off (hopefully), but it really isn’t acceptable to ring at that time – I’m sure it can’t be too productive for them either. Who’s going to buy something over the phone at that time of day? I also hate it when I get repeated calls from the same people – I know they  do it enmasse and don’t really care if they ring the same person multiple times but it’s still frustrating.

I always find it difficult to believe that anyone actually buys something from a cold caller, but obviously they do otherwise they wouldn’t do it. With the wages paid to the people doing the calling being relatively low, I suppose the company only needs to make a small number of sales to turn a profit.

There also seems to be a larger number of scam calls. One I’ve heard of recently involved someone ringing your house and telling you they’re calling about your Windows computer. Obviously, the vast majority of people will have a Windows machine in the house, but it still builds up a little trust between the person and the caller. The cold caller will then try to sell the person antivirus software which is actually a malicious program. Definitely one to watch out for!

What makes these scams more worrying is that some criminals have set up large call centres in third world countries with the sole purpose of ringing the UK. It shows how profitable this kind of business can be – and probably means that we’ll be getting a lot more cold calls in the future.