Brit's up and down the land are being plagued by calls from 0203 103 5180, whilst most take the form of nuisance silent calls, however many people have been reporting that the caller proports to be calling on the behalf of a major UK Bank, The Halifax (Bank of Scotland) and proceeds to ask for personal banking and circumstance information.

With people wondering if the surge in calls across the phone network is somehow related to the loss of child benefit data on the whole country by the government , as the majority of the calls ask to speak to the homemaker i.e. who would tend to be the recipient of child benefit so we dug a little deeper to get to find out who is actually behind these calls.

After more than 20 attempts at calling the number back, many of which end with a silent answering machine, I finally resulted with the message that you were contacted by " FirstAssist Halifax bank of scotland and we will try to contact you again shortly".

Having enquired with Halifax Customer Relations I was informed that they are aware of FirstAssist and that they were undertaking a marketing campaign for the Halifax, and may be attempting to sell insurance, hence a call centre service and therefore the 02031035180 is not the originating number but rather a routing number.

Unfortunately being subscribed to the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) is not preventing hundreds of thousands if not millions of people from getting these nuisance calls from the Halifax. People who repeatedly receive calls should complain directly to the Halifax, despite First Assist not being part of the Halifax BOS group.

People can also complain directly to Ofcom if they receive repeated silent calls which are in breach of the rules put in place as of 1st Of March 2006 - http://www.ofcom.org.uk/complain/landline/nuisance/silent/?itemid=284912

By Sarah Jones
(c) Marketoracle.co.uk 2005-07. All rights reserved.

The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Forecasting & Analysis online publication. We present in-depth analysis from over 100 experienced analysts on a range of views of the probable direction of the financial markets. Thus enabling our readers to arrive at an informed opinion on future market direction. http://www.marketoracle.co.uk

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Sarah Jones Archive

Comments

vash
06 Jun 08, 07:48

hmmm

Telephone Preferance Service customers are legally allowed to be called by companies like FA as it is not classed as cold calls to be fair.

Sarah
06 Jun 08, 09:09

First Assist

So its acceptable for First Assist to make thousands of silent nuisance calls without any consquences ?

terena
19 Jun 08, 05:09

silent call from 1st assist

all the calls from first assist are made from Bournmouth

0845 076 0132. it took me ages at track them down after getting at least 2 silent calls every day.

I hope this number is handy to any other victims

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