Commercial calls, now also known as spam calls, are those in which companies contact you to try to sell you a product or service. These have been one of the things that most annoys users, because apart from the fact that in the vast majority of occasions what they offer us is not of interest to us, many times it catches us at the worst moment.
Whether it’s just when we close our eyes to take a nap or at the moment we have to pay at the store, it seems that these companies have a sixth sense to call us at the worst possible time. And it’s not just that this happens once in a day, but there are cases where we receive several of these spam calls.
In addition, with the rise of cybercrime and calls being one of the most popular ways they manage to scam us, it’s normal that you want to put an end to this type of calls as soon as possible to avoid creating more confusion between a commercial call and a phone scam.
While it is true that these type of calls has already been regulated in several countries, and initially the amount of these that users receive has been reduced, phone spam is still a nuisance that you could end up by saying some “magic” words.
How to stop SPAM calls
When we receive one of these calls, our instinct tells us to hang up directly, however, this only postpones the problem, as in hours or days we will receive another call. The key here is to ask the following question: “Where did you get my number from?”
This is because with data protection law, on one hand, companies cannot make random calls as they used to, and today they have to tell us where they got our number from and what treatment they are doing with that information,
The situation can lead to two endings, the first, where they tell us that it is a company with which we have signed some kind of contract or agreement, and among the conditions there is one in which we have authorized them to make commercial calls. Here we will only have to ask them to stop doing it, and following the regulations of the Data Protection Agency (AEPD) they will have to stop.
It can also happen that the operator refuses to give you this information (something illegal and reportable to the AEPD), and that would mean that they made the call randomly. In these cases, if you ask the magic question, they usually hang up directly without saying anything else and in principle they will not call you back.
If in the following days you continue to receive this type of calls, what you have to do is write down the number from which they call you and while you are on the call threaten them with a complaint to the AEPD, this is usually enough for at least that company to stop calling you.
