Rather than just getting angry or slamming the phone down, you can have fun at the cold caller’s expense.

The Quick Put-Off

If you’re in a hurry or just cannot be bothered with cold callers, then try one of these opening lines and you probably wont need to say anything else as the caller is likely to give up.

“Hampshire Constabulary Incident Room, Detective Inspector Jones speaking,”

“Surbiton Pizza Hut, is your order for collection or delivery?” (in the typical teenage tone).

“Cyber and Communications Crime Unit,”

“PPI Compensation Hotline, let’s start with you telling me your full name and address” (get them with their own game – PPI is long gone but who cares)

“Thank you for calling ‘The Smithson Clinic’. To book an appointment, press 1.” (followed by a long list of different fake options).

The Longer Game

Remember – they phoned you to waste your time, so why not waste theirs?

You can keep the caller busy with pointless questions and responses till they eventually get fed up and give up. Give these approaches a try:

• Pretend you can’t hear very well and make them repeat each statement multiple times
• Pretend to be stupid and misunderstand everything they say
• Repeat back to them each thing they say, but slowly
• Ask their opinion on any soap opera or reality TV series that you watch then regale them with how wonderful the programme is
• Pretend to cry – tell them you’ve broken up with your true love and are heart broken (good for any budding actors) and pour out any anger you’re feeling.
• Pretend you know the caller and invent a whole back story for last time you saw them and refuse to accept that they don’t know you

Any of these tricks are likely to have the caller put down the phone but it depends how well you play your part. So, enjoy yourself, be creative and waste their time.

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.

Charities have long been an established part of life, carrying out everything from hospice care to cancer research to caring for orphaned children to seeking responsible treatment of animals etc.

In Britain there are well over 200,000 registered charities and estimated to be a lot more that aren’t registered as they are too small.

Charities have a good name and do a good job but in recent years in the UK, many large charities became too focussed on collecting money and using unscrupulous methods to do so.

From reports of chuggers (the charity collectors in the street who stop you and wont let go till you’ve signed up) to the ones that trade names of donors so they can each cold call more people, to those using boiler room tactics on cold calling. Some people have reported getting hundreds of such calls per week and being frightened to leave their phone connected.

There is now the Fundraising Preference Service.

You can register online at https://public.fundraisingpreference.org.uk/

Or call 0300 303 3517. You register yourself (or another person) so as to not be bothered by the charities you elect to block.

You need to supply your name and address and pick which charities to block.  That’s all there is to it.

You can register someone else on the service and they will be sent a message informing them of the registration. This is so that carers and family members and neighbours can register people unable to do so themselves.

Most of the charities have learned to behave better following the bad publicity but this will hopefully make them more responsible as well and stop a lot of the unnecessary bothering of people that still goes on.

In its first days, the FRP was receiving 114 requests per hour so you can see this service is very much needed.

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