Forum Discussion

MrsM4's avatar
MrsM4
Tuning in
7 hours ago

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!

3 Replies

  • japitts's avatar
    japitts
    Very Insightful Person
    6 hours ago

    Cold & spam calling is an industry-wide problem, no provider (fixed or mobile) is immune from it.

    Many mobile providers offer WiFi-calling as a means of using your phone indoors without need for mobile coverage, where the WiFi-router provides your radio connection to the mobile network instead of network coverage.

    That said, personal advice would be to retain a landline if it's not hindering you - if there is ever a problem with your mobile or suchlike, then too many users are then incapable of making contact because they have no other phone. Putting all your eggs in one technological/provider basket, so to speak, does leave you stuck if that "one egg" has a problem.

  • Carley_S's avatar
    Carley_S
    Icon for Forum Team rankForum Team
    6 hours ago

    Hi MrsM4 

    Welcome to the Community Forums. 

    Sorry to hear that you're experiencing high levels of nuisance calls. Sadly there isn't a feature that can block these at this time. We do offer feature such as anonymous caller reject, but as you say, this does also filter all withheld numbers and you may still receive some cold calls that can bypass this. 

    There are handsets that offer some blocking technology which may interest you if you're looking at reducing those types of calls. We have some helpful tips and support here for things you can do for nuisance calls which you can take a look to see if this helps. 

    If you suspect a fraud call then we have more advice on those types of calls here and here.