I hate telemarketing with a passion. In Australia, I used the “Do Not Call Register“:
Now that I’m living in the Netherlands, I’m not sure if there is an equivalent, but rarely give out my number and thankfully don’t get many calls (yet).
* Update – thanks to Tim, who commented on this post on the Dutch Australian Facebook page – here’s the Dutch equivalent :
However I did recently discover this useful website, so sharing for those in the Netherlands:
You can type a number in here and then, if that number is in the database, you can read other comments (usually in Dutch but a few comments here and there though the site in English I noticed). You can add your own comments and rank calls with a colour as to how “dangerous” you think they are (e.g. it seems a trick some spammers use is that they call you and hang up, then you call back as you have a missed call and it costs a fortune).
It’s helped me twice in the last few weeks. The first time, I kept missing an 020 number, which I knew was Amsterdam, and found out via this site it was Albert Heijn calling me – so the next time they called I didn’t mind answering (I often don’t answer unknown numbers), it was something to do with my supermarket delivery service.
The number that called me today seems to be “telephone spam” and thanks to this site I simply blocked it (which you can do via an iPhone by clicking on the “information” and then selecting “block this number”).
Hope that’s useful to some of you! Comments welcome about telemarketing in either the Netherlands or Australia.
Renee
Dutch Australian 