A simple solution to the plague of automated sales calls

The last few years, the problem of automated sales calls, both those that connect you to a salesperson, and lately the much worse ones that play an automated message, has got out of hand. There is a very simple solution - it does require legislation, and a little technical implementation, but it exists:

Step one:

legislate cold calling as an offence, particularly calls with a recorded message. 1000 GBP per offence strikes me as a nice sized penalty. Place the onus on the caller to prove that the recipient has opted in to their mailing list.

"But", I hear you protest, "we have legislation to prosecute cold callers already and it never gets enforced. The caller just withholds their number or provides a bogus one".

That's where step two comes in:

introduce an offence - routing a call where caller ID isn't presented. Large penalties on the telecoms companies for failing to provide accurate caller ID information on every call. Domestic subscribers don't see this, but multi-line commercial phone connections include the facility to set up the caller ID. The subscriber chooses what caller ID to present to public view. That's why you get calls from "12340 000000" etc.

There are a few possible objections:

"It's important to allow subscribers to withhold their number to protect their privacy" - ok, so if a domestic subscriber requests to withhold their number, present a separate number that won't connect to them, but is nevertheless registered with their phone company to their name.

"Sometimes we don't have the caller ID information" - the telecoms companies always have an origin of the call - otherwise, how would they know who to bill? It's a fairly trivial software problem to present it. If it's a call coming in from outside their network (like an international call), they can present a number for the telecoms company routing the call. We'd soon get to know who the spammers were, and start blocking them. If XYZ telecom is the origin of 90% of my spam phone calls, I'm going to block it whether any of my friends use it or not, then suggest to them that they move providers.

"It's too technically complex" - not true, see above.

"It's too expensive" - really not true, see above.



A year or two of that, and we'd soon see an end to

"You may be entitled to a refund on your PPI payments....."