Years ago I registered my phone numbers on the Do Not Call Register. Lately I have been getting more and more “marketing” calls on both numbers. Many of them, annoyingly, are from private numbers. With four three teenagers and one young adult, I always feel a compulsion to answer calls. Who knows what trouble young people can get themselves into these days!

Today I got yet another call and I really saw red. My boss happened to be in my office at the time and said those three little words. Do Not Call Register. OK, be picky – four little words. I’d forgotten completely that my original registration had probably expired.

What was on the top of my list of tasks when I got home? Re-register!

I honestly think this could be another service the government could add to the MyGov site. It takes up to thirty days for the marketing cold callers to remove a number for their lists. I notice there was a scam alert in June last year.

Consumer Alert: Scammers posing as Qantas and Virgin Australia

The ACMA has received an increase in reports from members of the public about automated voice calls. The call suggests to ‘press 1’ to claim a loyalty reward or redeem a prize from Qantas, Virgin Australia or similar. These are scam calls.

Where members of the public do ‘press 1’, they are taken to a human operator who will ask a number of questions, including a request for credit card details.

You should never provide your credit card details under these types of circumstances.

If you receive a call, or repeated calls like this, simply hang up.

For more information on this specific scam, see the ScamWatch alert: Automated scam calls claiming to be from Qantas with bogus holiday win.http://www.scamwatch.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/1139946

You can report phone scams to http://www.scamwatch.gov.au or by calling 1300 795 995.

I hope not many people got caught in that one.

Interestingly, the Do Not Call Register now has ten million numbers registered. Given the Australian population is 23.7 million, that is a lot of phones! Many phones registered would be business phones, I am sure, but even so, ten million is a lot of phones.

Of course my email address has changed since I originally registered, so I had to re-register from scratch. That reminded me I’d better re-register the home phone as well.

If you’ve never registered, I do recommend it. For years I was rarely bothered by telemarketing calls so it does work. Now I just have to wait thirty days for peace and quiet once more!