Trading Standards Scotland have been working for many years to protect Scottish households from nuisance and scam calls on their landlines. Their projects have blocked almost a million nuisance calls and prevented over 1,300 scams. The trueCall technology they used is now available on mobile phones. In a new project funded by the Scottish Government, Trading Standards Scotland can offer this service free of charge to eligible people.
trueCall SIM is a SIM card that plugs into your mobile phone. Your phone will ring as normal when you are called by a friend, family member or other trusted caller, but calls from anyone else are intercepted. The caller is told that you don’t accept cold calls, and that they should press a key on their phone to get through to you. Only if they do this will your phone will ring. This blocks all silent calls and recorded message calls and the vast majority of call centres. In multiple trials across the country by police forces, trading standards teams and charities this simple procedure has been shown to block over 95% of unwanted calls.
If you want further protection – to block all unwanted calls - then trueCall has settings that only allow calls through from people whose number is on your trusted caller list. In this situation all other callers are either given the phone number of a designated person who will deal with these calls, or the call is diverted directly to the designated person.
To see how this works in practice see the videos above. There are three settings - Shield, Trusted Access and Carer Check - you can choose the most appropriate one for your own situation.
You can refer yourself, or organisations can refer people to the project if they have been scammed (or if they are at risk of being scammed). If the referral is accepted you will be sent a trueCall SIM card. This will replace the SIM card that you already have. It gives you unlimited texts, unlimited calls to UK numbers and 2GB of data per month along with the trueCall call blocking service free of charge for two years.
We ask you to fill in a survey/consent form and return it in the supplied pre paid envelope, then text your provider to get a PAC code. This allows us to move your phone number from your existing supplier to trueCall – it normally take 1 – 2 days.
trueCall’s staff are available to help you swap the SIM cards and answer any questions that you have.
After you have been using the SIM card for six month we will be send you a letter asking for your feedback. At the end of the two year period you can choose to continue with the service or transfer your number over to another supplier. Of course, if you are not happy with the service you can cancel it at any time.
For more information about the programme please contact the agency that you’re working with.
