The Telemarketers

There is a group people. Their job is to call you up and making offers to you.
The offers, sometime attractive sometime not.
But they are calling you for sure, either you are in the meeting, in the cinema, in the car, or in the bed with your loved one.

How annoyed!

Today, when the same telemarketer (+65 65079760)called me for 5 times, how persistence. Then I realised I have to do something to stop this. So i listed down a few options that i can think of...

1. Change my mobile number, so they can't get me. But I will have to update my friends and family bout the change of my phone number. But sooner or later, they will still manage to find my number and start calling me again.
2. Terminate my mobile line and home line. erm....
3. Do nothing and let them call, be kind to them, they are just doing their job, time is bad and who wanna be a telemarketer? Just tell them nicely I am not interested to their offer, thank you, bye bye..... the next day the other telemarketer will call you.
4. Try to remember/record the phone numbers of telemarketers. So next time when they call, you can just reject the call. And sooner my phonebook will become a telemarketer directory which "classified" them by the offers they made. Idea hor...
5. Reject all "Private Numbers" or "anonymous callers" or what do you call that. But this is a dangerous thing to do. Imagine one day your mother might be calling you for help by using a public phone, some public phone are showing "Private Number" to your mobile phone too. If you reject the private numbers calls, you might be rejecting your lovest one SOS call.

So, there is no a perfect way to stop them. then I did some google-ing. There is something called "Do-not-call list" in some countries. Which is a list containing the contacts/names/numbers of people who do not want to be called by telemarketers, cold callers or whatever you call them. How effective is the list, i don't know. But i believe, if this "do-not-call list" does not have any rules and regulations or governing bodies to back it up, it might ended up to be a "please-call-me list".

With this thought, which led me to think of how on earth they got our number. Here come another list of my thoughts, some were told to me by friends of mine.

1. The survey forms and lucky draw application forms we filled up on the street, on the news paper. The greed in us led us to the trap of this cold calling activities.
2. Some unethical companies who leak their clients' contact details to another business partners.
3. Everyone's contact details are actually stored in a powerful database. Our income, financial status, contact numbers, age, gender, spouse, kids, ID, etc. These database are being maintained by some companies and the data are subscriptable. Yes, payers get the info, sounds like science fiction to you?

They have our number!!! Can we have a list of phone number of them? Yes, we can! This is what i want to say after writing such a long story:

The idea is simple and stupid. Here's the step:

1. Just send or "leave a comment" regarding the number of the telemarketer or cold caller who just annoyed you. Best if you can write down the product they are offering and their company's name.
2. Then i will publish their numbers/company's on this blog and open to everyone. So everyone can come to this blog and try identify them.
3. You can reject the call when you see a unfamiliar number.
4. visit blog and check for the number who just called.
5. If you can't locate the number here, you may call back the caller if you think it is important.
6. If you are so unlucky to return a telemarketer's call and get annoyed, please come back here and contribute the number to the blog.
7. As this blog grow, we can gather their number and black list them. We can make a sharable contact file which can conveniently sync with our mobile phone contact list and reject their call before they annoyed us.

I am not sure can this work as i wished but i got to try. Hope the step above is simple and clear to you. If youre annoyed just like me, please contribute to the list.