Number is up for cold callers

You'll have to be clever to catch me out

The renewal quote came through and I was staggered by the price hike. OK, I had changed to a much newer car since the last renewal.

But when I actually changed vehicle, the remaining six weeks of my previous cover cost less than £3 a week for a car worth probably 20 times as much as the faithful old Honda now probably consigned to the scrapyard.

Simple maths led me to believe that my insurance would go up around £150 a year.

Imagine, therefore, my surprise when the renewal came up with a price hike of over £700 a year.

A quick query with that provider didn’t get me too far.

So I jumped on a price comparison websites, found an insurer I had heard of and actually insured the new car for less than the old one.

What I should have remembered was that I had been forced by a box with a red asterisk at its side to submit my mobile number.

And in the eight weeks or so since then I have been plagued with phone calls from numbers I just don’t recognise. I ignore them.

Some of them try and trick you into believing that they are local calls.

But answer me this: if you received a call from an 01282 number that then started with a 9 after the dialling code, would you be suspicious? I certainly am. I am well used to getting calls that start with a 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 or 8 after the 01282 bit, but not a 9.

And this is where the tricksters in the world of cold calling let themselves down. They can pick any old dialling code they want in a bid to make the recipient of their unwanted calls feel at home.

But they need to do a little more research to catch the savvy among us out.

And messing it up with a number starting with a 9 is not going to do the trick.

The other thing I now always do is check the number out. Enter it into any search engine and it will throw up a reverse directory and then tell you who owns the number.

Every single one of the 20 or so new numbers I have been plagued with recently has been unwanted. And they are now all blocked!