The 25-year war on so-called nuisance calls and texts appears no closer to being won, with complaints set for a three-year high during 2024 as the Information Commissioner’s Office continues its game of Whac-A-Mole against the scammers.
The ICO first started regulating telemarketing in 1999, when it became a statutory requirement for companies to check phone numbers against the Telephone Preference Service after it was included in the Privacy & Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR).
The law was later expanded to cover unsolicited SMS and email marketing.
According to the latest figures on the ICO website, there have been 71,639 complaints filed under PECR from January to October this year, averaging out at over 233 complaints every day of the year so far. If this trend continues, there will be a total of over 86,000 by the end of 2024.
This would represent a significant increase on 2023’s figure of 75,349 complaints and 2022’s 56,015, although the latter was described at the time as a “freak reduction”. You have to go back to 2021 to find more complaints, when Covid rogues pushed the level up to 118,009.
While rogues are now just as likely to target mobile phones, the move follows the recent publication of a study by refurbished tech firm Back Market, which analysed the number of nuisance call reports coming from 752 landline area codes in the UK.
The figures, which are based on reports to who-called.co.uk since 2015, reveal which area codes receive the highest percentage of reports nationally.
Given its size, it is perhaps no great surprise to find that London takes the top spot for the area where the most nuisance calls come from. A total of 3.58 million reports have been made against 020 area code numbers on who-called.co.uk, making up 20.14% of the UK’s 17.77 million reports.
Manchester is in second place, with 3.44% of all reports filed nationally against 0161 area code numbers. In total, Manchester numbers have had 611,150 nuisance caller reports.
However, Blandford Forum in Dorset is third, with 2.86% of the UK’s reports. The 01258 area code has had 508,653 nuisance call reports in total, an alarming figure considering Blandford has a population of just 11,796.
Liverpool, Leicester, Leeds, Birmingham, Sheffield, Glasgow and Bristol make up the top ten.
A Back Market spokesperson said: “Unwanted phone calls have become an all too common facet of modern life, with scammers regularly making outbound calls that many people would rather avoid. These are so common that many people feel apprehensive when they see an unknown phone number, especially if it is a landline.
“We analysed what people had to say in their reports to identify the most common type of scam nationally. We found that scammers routinely impersonate trusted institutions like banks, Amazon, and Internet providers such as BT. Banks were the most frequent institution scammers impersonated, with 587 out of 1,168 reports (50%) we looked at mentioning matters relating to bank accounts.”
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