Woman strings cold caller along with hilarious yarn
A woman constantly plagued by cold callers has taken a witty revenge that's been viewed over 12,000 times on Facebook.
Deanne Gold, of St Albans in Hertfordshire, says she had been receiving cold calls for weeks suggesting that she'd had an accident and that she should seek compensation.
Last week, she finally snapped - and instead of hanging up, proceeded to convince the confused caller that she'd damaged her car running over a cow.
"What happened was I was driving along a main road and suddenly this cow came out. It was a road where there were fields and a cow came out and crossed the road," she tells him.
"That's absolutely dreadful - did you impact the cow?" the call centre worker asks.
"Yes, I did - sorry, that makes me cry because I killed the cow... it was a terrible thing, the poor cow was lying dead in the road."
She continued, claiming that the farmer had offered to let her take the cow home for dinner: "But I didn't think that was right," she says.
Mrs Gold keeps the caller on the line for over six minutes while he expresses his sympathy, pointing out that the cow was probably set for slaughter anyway.
The video highlights just how hard it is to avoid cold callers, offering to get you compensation for accidents or for mis-sold payment protection insurance (PPI). According to the Nuisance Calls Taskforce, there are as many as a billion unwanted calls made every week in the UK.
We recently reported on one outfit in Hove that was using automatic dialling technology to make between four and six million calls every day, offering debt management or PPI refunds.
So what - other than inventing murdered livestock - can you do to get rid of the cold callers?
First, registering with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS), either online or by calling 0845 070 0707, should eliminate a lot of the calls - although research has shown that two thirds still get through. Overseas call centres don't have to respect TPS requests.
Nor will registering with the TPS get rid of calls when you've, perhaps inadvertently, signed up for marketing information; here, though, contacting the organisation direct should do the trick. If all else fails, you can simply block calls from that number.
And, in future, read marketing information very carefully to make sure you tick or untick the right boxes to opt out of sales calls.
Read more on AOL Money:
How to prevent annoying PPI calls
Cold calls: five ways to stop them
Watchdog warns savers to be on their guard
