Cold Callers – More Of Them?
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.