4 spam calls in 5 minutes is kind of crazy and it actually increases after 5 pm. Being so close together you know it is from the same call center.
Lately I have noticed an increase in the amount of spam marketing calls I am receiving daily and I was trying to work out what triggered this. Personal data is big business these days with companies paying good money for your contact details.
The only new purchase lately has been the motor vehicle we bought which included dealing with a car tracking company for insurance purposes. I never contacted any insurance companies as I kept the same one I use for my properties and negotiated a bundle deal. It is amazing how much you can negotiate down when you bundle this as a package.
The obvious one is the car dealer where we purchased the vehicle and they then sell on the data to another company who then farms out this information for another fee. The unsolicited calls are mainly car insurance companies trying to sell you their services and since I know I never phoned around for quotes someone informed them of our recent purchase.
I have not purchased anything for a long time that requires myself to sign any paperwork and this was definitely what has triggered the volume of spam phone calls lately. On average I would estimate between 6 and 10 daily with all of them highlighting car insurance.
You do start to wonder how much is all this personal data worth and is it even worthwhile for these companies to sell this as an add on to the purchase deal. The car dealership we used is called We Buy Cars and reports suggest they sell an average of 15 000 cars per month. The core of the business is selling vehicles, but once you see all the add ons they can make you start to see the bigger picture.
When you are purchasing a vehicle you are in a prime target bracket for marketing sales companies as it highlights you have a decent enough credit score. This apparently is worth anywhere between R50 ($3) and R200 ($12) per customer so 15000 contacts being sold off each month becomes a valuable earner. That is not all because if they finance the vehicle they receive commissions plus if you use their in house insurance companies they are paid even more commission.
On my phone I have had to install the app "True Caller" as at least this notifies you if it is a marketing company by highlighting the call in red as a spam call. This is a must have these days as I receive so many business calls from new customers I would be not sure if they were spam or genuine calls.
I am hoping over the next month or so the marketing calls start dropping off unless they are then sold on to a third party at a discounted price to then try their luck. This is big business for these companies and I am not dumb enough to think that they will just give up.
Many years ago when working in the UK for a well known cigarette company we had various competitions that we ran for the consumers. The consumers used to enter these competitions and their data was then sold on for profit. Quite unreal when you think about this as the competition was a marketing exercise that the company was making a profit from and from my perspective disagree with this mentality. Your personal data should not be for sale and if everyone knew this was going to happen then no none would bother entering these competitions.
I am sure when we purchased the vehicle last month there was written somewhere in the fine print stating our details will be used for marketing purposes. This would legally cover them, but the chances of you actually reading this part is highly unlikely as you sign multiple contracts consisting of many pages and cannot read every line.