One million act to block nuisance calls

BT surprised by huge interest in phone privacy service

One million households have hung up on nuisance calls by signing up to BT's privacy service.

The telco said registrations are currently running at up to 30,000 every day, with a new registration roughly every three seconds. The service was launched in mid-July.

BT also said its Nuisance Calls Bureaux are logging 130,000 complaints per month, which led to the company deciding to take action.

The BT privacy service gives its customers a free caller display (for which the telco usually charges £1.75 per month) and registers them with the Telephone Preference Service which the company said can filter out around 90 per cent of unsolicited marketing calls.

BT Retail chief operating officer John Petter said the huge interest in the service had taken the company by surprise.

"To have a customer sign up every three seconds is remarkable and just shows what an irritant many of these calls are," he said in a statement. "It's clear that our customers are telling us that they don't want silent calls and some of them don't want to receive unsolicited marketing calls."

Telemarketing is widely regarded as the most intrusive of all marketing.