BT has developed a service designed to give customers ‘the means to fight back against unwanted calls, for free’.
At the start of this month, the Information Commissioner’s Office reported that more than 370 complaints were made about nuisance phone calls every day.
The average BT customer faces four nuisance calls per week and although they are an annoyance to many, for the elderly and vulnerable they are considerably dangerous.
40% of calls to the elderly and vulnerable are nuisance calls.
Organised crime utilises cold calling as a tool to deceive the weakest members of society and callers’ requests for personal information are often successful.
BT has responded to this growing problem by launching ‘BT Call Protect’ aimed at taking on 30 million nuisance calls per week and diverting them to a ‘junk inbox’.
The system will accurately identify and block ‘rogue numbers’ that are making large quantities of calls.
Fear not, if a nuisance caller slips through the gaps, customers can dial 1572 after hanging up and BT will take action.
A BT Blacklist will be developed and constantly updated. Any number added to the list will be blocked from all BT customers.
BT Call Protect is an improvement on a similar system used by Talk Talk for the past three years. But whilst Talk Talk blocks 92 million calls per month, BT promises to fight almost double this amount.
Here’s to a future free from nuisance calls – perhaps the NHS will report a drop in average blood pressure readings.