At the last count a week ago, I was shocked to discover that I have blocked a total of 652 handphone numbers.
I am not sure about you but not a day passes by when I don’t receive a call or a message from a strange number.
The calls were either from an automated calling machine or someone asking me if I would be interested in their products or service offerings.
Meanwhile, the messages, either in the form of SMS or on WhatsApp, were mostly about offering loans or enquiring whether my properties were available for sale or rental.
The calls have escalated to become so annoying that I have resorted to ignore or reject them whenever I saw an unknown number.
The moment I received a message from an unknown number, I have developed a habit of blocking it immediately before deleting it.
With so much news about scammers these days, I believe ignoring such calls and messages is the right thing to do. After all, it is better to be safe than sorry.
On some rare occasions when out of curiosity I took the calls, the caller would go on a continuous ramble of words to promote their products.
It doesn’t matter to them if I was paying attention or not. I suppose they must have received so many rejections that getting an answer must be a blessing. Hence, they blasted you with a torrent of words just to complete their tasks. I have an odd feeling that they were paid in that manner.
But ignoring calls from an unknown number also has its inherent risk.
What happen if your spouse or children lose their handphones and need to borrow one from a stranger to call you in an emergency ? My wife and I have since agreed on our secret code to address this issue.
It is actually not that difficult to figure out from where these cold callers got hold of our handphone numbers.
When we bought a property or applied for a loan from a bank, we were required to disclose our personal data. With this, it is safe to say that the following organisations will have our full personal information, including our handphone numbers :-
- Property developers and all its subsidiaries including the property management companies
- Legal firms that executed our sales and purchase agreement
- Statutory bodies that provide us with electricity, water and sewerage services
- Banks and financial institutions that provide us the loan
- Insurance companies
The list is not exhaustive. Any one of them that failed in their duties and responsibilities to protect the data diligently could lead to our personal information falling into the wrong hands.
I am quite certain a leak has occurred somewhere and at some point in time. Otherwise, there is no reason why I still receive hundreds of messages from real estate agents offering their services of selling or renting my properties, some of which were already disposed of ages ago.
It is apparent that they are getting hold of a blanket of names and their datas that are outdated. But this is the least of the concern of cold callers. This is because the names of high net worth individuals constitute a good prospective list.
Marketers make cold calls as their first tactic of closing a deal. To them, successful sales are a result of a number game. The more the merrier. Hence, we often find companies willing to pay anyone who can supply them with a list of names and their personal datas so that they can be used as part of their sales prospecting.
A company that fail to have a good system in place to protect its own customers base may unknowingly cause the list to be leaked out.
The legal framework and infrastructure in our country has always been well placed. While the Personal Data Protection ( Amendment ) Act 2024 will come into force in April this year to increase the penalty for those who misuse our personal datas, we are often faced with weak enforcements.
It is high time the Department of Personal Data Protection under the ambit of the Ministry of Communications and Multi Media Commission, put their act together to trace the source of the leak of handphone numbers.
I don’t think it is that difficult to find the culprit if they put enough effort into it.
Otherwise my number of blocked handphone numbers will reach 1,000 anytime soon.
Vincent Lim is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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