Re: If anyone
"Yeah, fully agree, especially when most of the calls originate offshore (even if they do spoof a local number)."
Worse, they tend to spoof valid and assigned local numbers. At least one I checked on belonged to a Manchester dentist who was wondering why they were getting hate calls.
However when it comes to PPI and injury claims, the money traces back onshore.
More tellingly than all this other stuff, the thing which stopped cold calling almost dead in the USA's 1995 Telephone Consumer Protection Act was defining statutory per-call damages (to prevent what's happened here, where damages claims have been thrown out as unprovable) AND explicitly allowing a right of private action in small claims courts against the caller AND the company that hired them, with triple damages for wilful violations (caller-id spoofing/blocking, or calling anyone on a Do not call list)
It's easy enough to fly under the ICO/Ofcom's radar or evade them when targetted, but the death of 1,000,000 papercuts is much harder to dodge.
Naysayers have claimed this would paralyse the small claims system entirely - if that's really the case then the problem is so bad that SOCA should be looking into the scale of calls and telco collusion(*) as a matter of urgency.
(*)Telcos make money from terminating these calls. It's not in their financial interest to block them(**)
(**) Unless the call routing information is forged, which only tends to happen on the outright scam calls.