{"id":37905,"date":"2018-01-08T22:49:27","date_gmt":"2018-01-08T22:49:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/?p=37905"},"modified":"2025-10-04T22:53:46","modified_gmt":"2025-10-04T21:53:46","slug":"cold-callers-getting-more-sophisticated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2018\/01\/08\/cold-callers-getting-more-sophisticated","title":{"rendered":"Cold callers getting more sophisticated"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/images\/ambulance-chaser.jpg\" title=\"Ambulance chaser\" alt=\"Cartoon of a lawyer chasing after an ambulance\" style=\"margin-left: 5px; margin-bottom: 5px; float: right;\" \/>Earlier today while drinking my coffee I got a call from a woman who told me that there was some sort of payout waiting for me as a result of a vehicle incident that wasn&#39;t my fault. I told her as soon as she mentioned that she&#39;d been told of such an incident that in fact <em>she hadn&#39;t<\/em> because no such incident had taken place. I asked her for details of the alleged incident, such as the date and location, and the registration number. She gave me a number (the number of my car) and a date (February 2015, suspiciously close to when I bought the car) but couldn&#39;t furnish me with the location.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Normally, I tell these sorts of callers that no, there was no incident and can you please stop calling me as I&#39;m not interested but this woman managed to keep me on the line which is a first for these sorts of people. I explained that if there had been a report of an incident, the location would have been included because it&#39;s a fundamental detail in any insurance claim. I&#39;ve filled out a few of these forms in my driving career and you always have to state the location. But no, she just said the only details she&#39;d been given (as was standard in her industry) was a name, date, phone number and registration number. The date did ring a bell, partly because that month I <em>did<\/em> actually have a minor incident in a truck &#8212; not my car &#8212; and partly because someone did hit my car when it was parked in a locked workplace car park around the time she mentioned and caused minor damage to one of the doors. But I&#39;m not sure exactly when. If I could get some money out of the people responsible I&#39;d be glad, but I don&#39;t know if it went as far as an insurance claim. I asked my agency to ask the client to investigate and have whoever had the CCTV footage of the day in question to have a look at them. But it didn&#39;t go any further, to my knowledge, and the incident I was involved in with the truck was settled then.<\/p>\n<p>So, I told the lady that she should go and ask her colleagues to get the details of the &#39;incident&#39; so we can see if it matches what I know, because if she was acting off a real insurance claim, those details would be available. She agreed to go and ask her colleagues and get back to me at some point in the future. I said, &quot;no, call me back this afternoon or tomorrow&quot; as it must be easy enough to find these things out.<\/p>\n<p>That was 12 hours ago and I&#39;ve not heard anything back from her.<\/p>\n<p>So, it looks like insurance claim cold-callers won&#39;t take no for an answer anymore &#8212; if you just say no, they will use some trick to keep you on the phone. If you don&#39;t know that you&#39;ve had an accident, you haven&#39;t. Really, you&#39;d remember it. The easiest way to deal with them is to hang up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier today while drinking my coffee I got a call from a woman who told me that there was some sort of payout waiting for me as a result of a vehicle incident that&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-road_life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-9Rn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37905"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40845,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37905\/revisions\/40845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}