Reporting unsolicited junk texts

How many do you get?  I decided to reply to one last week to see what happened, apparently I was due £2351.23, excellent…

I got a call 3 hours later from a call centre so I asked them to arrange the claim for me. Surprise, they didn’t actually know I was due the money but apparently they had a database that said I’d had a bank loan, credit card, or mortgage in the last 10 years so therefore I was likely to be due a claim.

Well I always knew PPI was a scam so no thanks I’ve never taken one out.

So how do you report this issue? It’s actually very simple so I suggest we all do it.  You can report them to your network operator. Unfortunately as the numbers often change, your network provider cannot guarantee to stop all unsolicited messages but if we all do this they will have to change so often maybe they’ll stop. You can either contact your network operator’s customer services, or forward spam text messages to 7726 (If you are a Vodafone user, forward to 87726 instead).  By the way never reply STOP as all they do is register your phone as “live” and sell the list onto someone else, and so the circle grows.

While I am on the subject of unwanted interruptions, on Tuesday I arranged motorcycle insurance with MCE Insurance.  I used Comparethemarket.com as putting all your details in time and time again is very tedious.  Since Tuesday I have had about 10 phone calls from insurers that were on the list wanting to sell me bike insurance, even though I’d already bought it.  The best of it is that 5 (now 9 as of Friday, see right) were from MCE Insurance. I was polite to the first one, “why doesn’t your system tell you I’ve actually purchased from you?”, far less polite to the second one, and the last 3 hung up when I answered.  I did a search for their phone number, 01933351680, and guess what, a ton of complaints. UPDATE: Just got another 2 hang up calls, Friday morning. ANOTHER UPDATE: Since getting an assurance from Ben Rowe in their customer completion team by email that my number had been removed from their database I have had 3 more calls.

WHY do companies do this, it’s stupid.  I’m so angry, they we’re even the cheapest but I’d used them before.

Such activity is unforgivable, OK the one’s I didn’t use were trying to get my business but there should be an opt out for this in the forms, but MCE have no excuse.