Or (if their number does come up), the cold caller PPI refund/ambulance-chasers' (etc) number can be given to another firm in the same field (maybe a certain spammer here who likes to 'sell' tree-based cooking room furniture) as your daytime contact number. Hopefully their switchboard will be overloaded with spurious calls so they can't call out to us. I've been tempted on the few occasions I've been called by these berks to say I work for the Serious Fraud Office....

I've a caller display and started answering withheld and international numbers with : "Pete's Pizzas", or "Pinky's porn emporium".

Seems that if they think it's a business number they stop calling.

Having wheels balanced at my local tyre fitters (he's a one man band and very meticulous, much better than the chain tyre shops) his phone kept ringing, he remarked that 9 out of 10 calls he got were spam of one sort or another.

I've a caller display and started answering withheld and international numbers with : "Pete's Pizzas", or "Pinky's porn emporium".

Seems that if they think it's a business number they stop calling.

I'd like to give them a verbal abusing of the highest order, the problem is it's not a human that calls. The calls are all recorded messages and most likely made by random auto diallers.

The TPS system all seems to work on these companies 'playing nicely' and ones that don't want to play ball have little to make them stop calling.

The problem here is the telephone service providers. BT, Virgin, Sky etc etc all have the facility to block these calls. But guess what? They want a monthly fee for it. So buy your own call blocker or just an answering machine and delete calls later. There is talk of legislation to froce the providers to indentify all incoming calls and block if requested, as part of the service. Guess what? All they will do is load the previous monthly fee onto the line rental. Typical Britain, wherever you turn some ba****d has his hand out for money for virtually nothing. Cheers Concrete

Its the rason why so many MPs are lawyers and solicitors - they have, in my opinion (just in case I'm sued), a vested interest in either keeping the status quo, or at least giving them (many still practice despite having a full day's work to do as MPs) and their mates (and for themselves when they finish as MPs) lots of 'new business' arguing in court for such (IMO) miscreants by making poor laws and/or very complex ones that only they understand (its why they resort to medieval language/grammar in writing the laws).

In many ways, engineers like myself are mugs (but hopefully honerable ones) for designing things that (hopefully) are easy to use/understand, that make our lives easier.

If lawyers and solicitors did what was sensible and just as regards making.upholding laws, most of them would be out of a job soon enough. And we wouldn't want that, would we?

I have used a call blocker for 5 years and I have had one SPAM call come through. Honestly. Just one.

For sure spammers call (seen on the call log) but because they are robot-diallers initially they can't navigate the blocker and they drop out. The one spammer that actually came through I just pressed #, put the phone down, and the blocker played a polite message to get lost and then added that number to my zap list.

The machine is a TrueCall unit. It works out the box but is highly confgurable via a browser account interface.

Forget TPS as any sort of defence. Get serious and use a blocker.