I wish you'd told me that waving a dead chicken over the phone would stop junk calls! I could have saved all that cash.

But where would the dead chicken log the calls it blocked?

My number is "in the public domain" because people need to be able to call me. Maybe if I'd started out Ex-D and kept it secret things might have been different.

Using a Chicken is definitely Foul play !

Dead chickens are a waste of time and money.

Hi everyone , just a bit of advice on how to stop nuicance phone calls which I have found to be very effective as I'm Fed up with receiving so many calls and wish to help others. First sign yourself up to the tps service which is free, but will only be effective for about a third of incoming calls. Second, (most effective way) I have found a site callblockerservices.co.uk which sells call blockers that can stop cold calls and international calls. If anyone else has any other advice or ideas then please reply with them.

I still need to get international calls, and I don't know the number of everyone that I might want to get a call from.

I do block Withheld numbers through the BT system as I don't need to hear from anyone or any company hiding their number.

On my iPhone I'm happy to answer withhelds if I have the time to indulge in some mischief making.

There's no end of fun you can have with them, and not just by lying.

We have a phone line here which we renumber every few months. We don't give it out to anyone so if it rings, it's not for us. Normally the first few weeks are the best. We get calls looking for the person who previously had that number.... mostly it seems to be from debt collection or marketing firms. After a few calls we can usually ascertain the name and address of where they think they are calling.

If it's debt, we say the person won the lottery and moved to Florida. If it's sales we ask them to come round with a demo.

One day I got a call from a very rude guy demanding to speak to Bob. I said Bob doesn't live here any more and when pressed, rudely, for details I told the caller that Bob's wife caught him shagging a bird from work and put all of his stuff in bin bags out in the garden two weeks ago. The caller asked who I was, so I said I'm her new boyfriend, at which point he hung up. I can only imagine how that played out in the pub or at work, when the rude guy meets Bob.

Truecall has two options you could use to intercept INTERNATIONAL calls - if you know who is calling you can give them a code to use which will get through or you can have it ask them their name, most hang up at that point, ones that do give a name are told to wait while truecall asks you to accept or reject the call.

The latest home answer-phone from BT ( BT 8500 ) does the same thing. If the caller is not in your phonebook memory or not on your "allowed list" it intercepts the call and asks the caller to give their name followed by # key. The phone then rings you and asks if you want to accept, reject or ban the call now or permanently. I've had it for 2 weeks & touch-wood I've gone from 2 to 4 a day to nil. It's about £60 from places like Argos.

Airpolice

Take care with withheld numbers. Calls from our GP's surgery and local hospital show up on the caller display as "withheld"; so if expecting calls from such sources answer the phone - a PITA, but better than not receiving a possible vital call.

When I receive the "we've detected your computers at fault" call, my standard reply is to ask "which one" which normally flummoxes the caller, so much so that on one occasion the caller with the Indian accent told ME to stop wasting HIS time!