Autodiallers

Having been at home for much of the last fortnight we've noticed how many recorded calls by autodialler we're getting now. It's about one every other day, except for today where there's been three already. Some of them are the usual badly recorded American voice offering some prize in Las Vegas or similar, others go dead immediately - presumably if we left it to the answerphone then we'd here the whole exciting pitch.

There doesn't appear to be a lot we can do about it. We could ban unannounced numbers, although that would cause problems for some legitimate commercial callers. Also that wouldn't solve the problem entirely because sometimes there is a number - it just doesn't appear to be a real number as the prefices don't seem to be legitimate (you get disconnected messages if you ring them and they are not listed in the official code lists [pdf])

For reference here are the numbers we've had recently:

• 08776 276 591 (4 calls)
• 08663 448298 (1 call)
• not available (3 calls)

Update: Apparently the banning you can do only affects "number withheld" whereas the autodialler calls from the US are "number not available" - so there'd be no point in that anyway. Also this afternoon we had three more calls so I've updated the numbers above - note six if those calls were received today.