Yesterday
(just as I were about to walk out my door to drive to work, so if I'm honest I was even less open to this kind of thing than usual) the phone rings, I forget the name of the company, but they asked me if they were speaking to
my name, to which I naively confirmed, they then immediately assumed it was okay to call me by some nickname. So already I was quite wary of this call.
Then they started talking about me having been in a road accident a "couple of years ago"
(very vague I thought) and that they could help me claim compensation of "approximately four figures".
Now, and this is the funny part, I've never been involved in a road accident in my life, neither driving, as passenger or pedestrian. So since I literally had one foot out of my door to go to work I wasted no time in informing them of this crucial little nugget of information.
"I don't understand" I replied,
"I've never been involved in a road traffic incident in my life."They seemed genuinely surprised at this.
"Oh really?!" they said in a high pitched tone of surprise
"Are you sure?""Um..." I begun
"I'd think I'd remember to be honest.""Oh... ah.. oohkay, erm I'll remove your details from the system and you won't hear from us again."
I fully expect another phone call imminently
. There's a important point in there to, firstly they didn't enquire if it was a good time for me to talk, they didn't ask permission to refer to me by a altered version of my name, yet in my experience this part is typical of cold callers. When claims advisory group originally called me about PPI mis-selling, they told me that I had such a beautiful name etc, and this just struck me as such a blatantly transparent attempt to manipulate.
From now on, any phone call from any company, I'll always ask them what the phone call is about before confirming any piece of information, even my name.