God damn cold callers! Orange you f*^%"£s

[fat jez]

Was even more fun when I worked at Orange. They would call up and get all excited and I would feign interest until I asked if I could keep my existing tariff. They always asked how I managed to get free Orange to Orange calls and no line rental. The usual response when I told them who I worked for was to hang up.

Cheers,
Stephen

[GDVS]

Orange wouldn't have given them your number, it is just people calling what is typically Orange numbers.

Many moons ago I worked for a fly by night mobile phone telesales mob (150 people in a room with phones and contract pads), I believe my team was one of the first in the country to start this (it certainly wasn't prevalent at the time).

As you all probably know there are lots of rules about who you can and who you can't call, TPS screened call lists etc. We were issued them but management didn't really give a crap if we used them or not, they were awful anyway (you'd find the same number on a page 6 times).

When cold calling trying to get someone to sign up for a phone contract you want broke kids working at McDonalds, Burger King, etc who just hit 18 and are still on PAYG. I did my best business with Claire's Accessories flirting with the 18yo shop assistants, anything to get a sale. We worked from Yellow Pages, house lists (i.e. internal lists of all outlets in a chain), anything that narrowed the target range to 18yo broke kids. We also (this is where it gets REALLY profitable) called ranges known to be PAYG phones starting at xxxxxxxx001 and working up, that way every person you talk to is on PAYG and therefore a potential mark.

At the time (don't know if it's changed) the company was paid upwards of £350 by the network for each contract we brought in, the cost of the phone came out of that and our cut was £10 (plus £5 an hour basic). We made a fortune out of our targetted calling and the money was great but you can only be told to drop dead so many times in a day before it gets a little soul destroying. No amount of money makes up for leaving work every day feeling like a lowlife bottom feeding rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbish so I quit and got a real job making less money but with a modicum of self respect.

The moral: No-one is safe from a manual dialler, you're just the next number in a sequence. At least auto diallers usually respect TPS.

Oh, and the company went bust and the directors ended up in jail. A fitting end to a bunch of thieving bastards.

[eloquence]

I generally just hang up on them... I did Telesales for about a month, and afterwards the point where someone started going into their pre-prepared script was just the queue to stop listening... I'm on TPS for my home phone, and that did mostly stop the calls.
Possibly it's better to just put the phone down on the desk or whatever - so they can run through their script (and run up their phone bill), before realising there's nobody actually listening...
Saying about Orange, though, Three caused me more problems - it took 3-4 phone calls, 3 letters and threats to terminate my contract early on the grounds that they were using my details to break the law to stop them sending me text messages and MMSs advertising their services - including their adult Top Shelf stuff (to which I complained that although I was registered as old enough, they had no way of knowing that I was not paying for a younger relative, so unsolicited advertising of adult content was entirely inappropriate). That the texts arrived at times like 5-6am (waking me up) didn't endear me to their advertising methods either... eventually you can get them to stop contacting you, though.
(I've had 3 contracts with Three, and only one had these problems, so they generally haven't been bad, just when they do have your number on their system incorrectly you'll get people insisting you've been removed when in fact they're checking the list on the wrong system - so it's bad call centre staff mainly.)