Genre: Instruction

Computing Service Telecommunications Office How to deal with unwanted calls Nuisance calls There are two types of unsolicited marketing calls, Telesales calls where one speaks to a person and Automated calls where one listens to a pre-recorded message. Silent calls fit within the latter group. This instruction sets out how to reduce and hopefully eliminate them. Telesales calls The Telecomms Office has registered all numbers in the ranges 33xxxx / 76xxxx and the majority of numbers in the range 74xxxx. Registration has to be done on an annual basis and registration was last requested in October 2011. Automated calls Automated calls can be very frustrating as generally the source is not known. Such calls are not covered by the TPS scheme. To reduce these calls, extension numbers must be registered with silentcall-gard . This should reduce the majority of such calls from UK sources but there are an increasing number of calls which originate from overseas and these generally cannot be stopped. The Telecomms Office has recently registered all the telephone number ranges mentioned above with silentcall-gard. Malicious calls Malicious calls should be dealt with on a case by case basis. Contact the Telecomms Office on extension 37070 if you are experiencing this sort of call. FAX calls It is possible to send a document from a FAX machine and if the distant end is either busy or temporarily out of service, it can be arranged to repeatedly attempt to send the document until the distant end answers successfully. Such an arrangement works well except when the caller has mis-dialled and a normal extension is called. As the FAX machine at the originating end does not see the response it expects, it repeatedly dials the same number to the frustration of the extension user. If you can detect such calls coming into your extension, then temporarily transfer your extension to a local FAX machine. Next time the distant FAX machine calls, it will get the responses it requires and the phone will stop ringing. Check the incoming FAX and if necessary advise the sender of the FAX that it has been misdirected.