Cold calling: three tips to avoid unwanted calls

Despite the measures taken by the government to limit wiretapping, three out of four French people are victims of it at least once a week.

To fight this scourge, UFC-Que Choisir has just developed a new tool, which adds to some already existing solutions.

· The BlocTel application

Bloctel is a free service that allows you to register to stop being a victim of cold calling. You can enter up to 10 phone numbers: your home numbers, for example.

This is a “list of opposition to the telephone poll”, prepared by the Ministry of Economy. Companies cannot contact people whose numbers are listed on them.

· Spam detection

Several companies have implemented an automatic spam detection service. This is the case of the Orange operator, which has implemented a tool to automatically block calls detected as spam. This function is activated by default on smartphones owned by the operator.

Likewise, Android smartphones have a similar tool. When a call is considered spam, the phone notifies its owner by displaying the message “Spam detected”, allowing them not to answer.

· The UFC-Que Choisir tool

The consumer protection association launched, on December 19, a new tool to better support telephone surveys. This tool allows you to object to the transfer of your contact data directly to your telephone operator: you will no longer be able to transmit the telephone number to public directories. The tool is called “Respect my data” and is available at this address.

In case of fraudulent number

If you receive an abusive probing call from a scam number, you should report it to the dedicated site, signal-conso. The same goes for a fraudulent SMS, and it is also possible to transfer it to 33 700.