Frequent cold calling
We have a virgin landline where we receive fairly regular cold calling, sometimes 2-3 times a day, offering windows, boilers, solar panels, loft insulation or some other apparently energy related government scheme to name just a few. They do not respect people's lives in the times they call and appear on the phone screen as local area numbers when they are clearly not. A few are automated, but most have someone clearly reading a prepared script to you. We are registered with the TPS on the landline number as well as our mobiles. We try to politely say we are not interested, but many ignore this and will continue to talk over you regardless.
Is there any way that Virgin can identify these cold calls and automatically block them? Other services providers are looking at and introducing this type of spam calling service. Or is the only option of plugging in and unplugging the phone after use the only option?
We've steered away from the formal call block that was on offer many years ago as it blocked calls from organisations which may withhold their numbers, including hospitals which are important to some and can't have these numbers blocked.
We have only reluctantly kept the landline purely down to the mobile reception in our area being poor indoors and sometimes having to revert to the old way of calling to make or receive a sucessful call from inside the house. The TPS has confirmed in the past our number on their list but it can't stop these cold callers from ignoring it!
Many thanks for all the answers to my post. They have all been really helpful. I hadn't considered using WiFi calling for our poor mobile reception which on further investigation would be not much different whatever netwirk we were using. I've since checked our phone settings and WiFi calling doesn't appear as an option on our phones (samsung/vodafone). A shame as that would have been a big winner for the mobile issue. Never say never, when we next have a need to update our phones I will make sure that I look for this as an option in phone choice.
With regards to the cold calling, I think I'd sort of accepted we may end up keeping the landline for as-required situations, however this forum has confirmed we would be doing the right thing in retaining it, for the time being anyway.
I'm going to read the jolly Rogers article for some hints and tips. Maybe I can find some time wasting ways to deal with these calls (where a real person is involved) to counter balance of my annoyance by in turn wasting their time too 🤣
