Nuisance calls and junk mail

Some useful tips!!!!!
Subject: REVENGE ON THE TELEMARKETER

REVENGE ON THE TELEMARKETER

Three Little Words That Work!!

(1) The three little words: 'Hold On, Please...'
Saying this, while putting down your phone and walking off (instead of hanging-up immediately) would make each telemarketing call so much more time-consuming that boiler room sales would grind to a halt.

Then when you eventually hear BT's 'beep-beep-beep' tone, you know it's time to go back and hang up your handset....you have efficiently completed your task..
These three little words could help eliminate telephone soliciting.
(2) Do you ever get those annoying phone calls with no one on the other end?
This is a telemarketing technique where a machine makes phone calls and record’s the time of day when a person answers the phone..

This technique is then used to determine the best time of day for a 'real' salesperson to call back and get someone at home. What you can do after answering: If you notice there is no one there, is to immediately start hitting your # button on the phone, 6 or 7 times, as quickly as possible. This confuses the machine that dialled the call and it kicks your number out of their system. Gosh, what a shame not to have your name in their system any longer!!!
(3) When you get those 'pre-approved' letters in the mail for everything from credit cards to 2nd mortgages and similar type junk, do not throw away the return envelope.

Most of these come with postage-prepaid return envelopes, right?It costs them more than the regular postage 'IF' and when they are returned. It costs them nothing if you throw them away! In that case, why not get rid of some of your other junk mail and put it in these cool little, postage-prepaid return envelopes.

Send an advert for your local chimney sweeper to American Express... they might need one!
Send a pizza coupon to HSBC... in case their canteen packs up. You get the idea.
If you didn't get anything else that day, then just send them back their blank application form... after all, it is their form!

If you want to remain anonymous, just make sure your name isn't on anything you return.

You can even send the envelope back empty if you want to just to keep them guessing! It still costs them, and it is their envelope after all… you are just returning it!!!!

The banks and credit card companies are currently getting a lot of their own junk back in the post, but folks....we need to OVERWHELM them, in order to stop them.

Let's let them know what it's like to get lots of junk mail, and best of all they're paying for it...Twice!

Let's help keep Royal Mail busy. Since the Royal Mail is saying that e-mail is cutting into their business profits, let's help them so they will not need to increase postage costs again... You get the idea!

If enough people follow these tips, it will work ---- maybe you'll get very little junk mail anymore.
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http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/like/4004...ff11=ICEP3.0.0&ff12=67&ff13=80&ff14=83&ff19=0

 

You can reduce your junk mail by registering your name and address on the MPS (mailing preference service) list. Its free and you can do it online.

http://www.mpsonline.org.uk/mpsr/

If you're on it, nobody is allowed to 'cold mail' you.

EDIT: Apparently nowadays you can do the Telephone Preference Service online too.

http://www.tpsonline.org.uk/tps/index.html

 

But you shouldn't have to!
There should be laws against this kind of thing.

 

Junk mail makes excellent firelighters

 

I see your point, but I'm not sure I agree.

I think most will agree that we need businesses to work in the UK. Otherwise we have no economy and we all have to go and live in the woods and eat berries.

Many, many business have no visible 'face' on the high street, and some aren't even on the internet. They need to tell customers that they exist somehow, otherwise they'd have no customers, would go bust, lay off all their staff raising unemployment, and no longer pay taxes.

So, they write to people (or phone them). Some people don't mind, some do. Those that do can register with a free service to prevent cold mailings/calls.

The companies that do it don't mind that you do so. They don't want to spend money contacting somebody that isn't going to be interested, so they routinely cross reference their databases against the MPS and TPS lists to remove those that opt out. It saves them money. Often thousands of pounds per campaign, and means that their 'cleaned' mailing list is more likely to bring in a higher reward.

Of course there are some companies that don't play by the rules. The worst of which seem to be phone calls from Eastern Europe and India. Places outside of our jurisdiction, and where wages are so low that it is more cost effective to get hoards of skint people to manually type up BT's phone book than it is to buy/rent a cleaned mailing list. The trouble is it is these companies that often rub people up the wrong way. In those situations it is especially useful to be on the MPS/TPS, because even though the calls may originate from outside of UK jurisdiction, often the companies they represent are not, and it is the company that gets prosecuted if they break the rules.

 

OK then lets have an "opt in"instead of "opt out", and it would be very interesting to know how many people would actually bother to "opt in".

The reason these companies have to go down this route is because they are usually providing a service nobody really wants or needs.
If you want or need something, you will find them.
I treat all junk mail as very dodgy and would not touch any of it with a barge pole.

 

Yet they make millions of pounds per quarter and often have hundreds of thousands of repeat customers

 

Those companys that do junk mail must make money, because it's not cheap to send everybody a nice bit of paper in the post

 

I do this. But instead of putting the junk back in it I draw pictures. One I sent back to Lloyds TSB was of a giant Octopus sitting on a big pile of coins.