Since yesterday afternoon I have received 8 or 9 Silent Calls where my CLI shows "Number Unavailable" and where the characteristic of the calls on each occasion was the same with the line being silent and then going to unobtainable when answered.  I do not normally receive Silent Calls and certainly not multiple ones.

However finally at 7.28pm tonight I got another Number Unavailable call and when I answered an Indian sounding gentleman on a hissy sounding line said he was calling me from the "Consumer Research Centre".

I then walked quickly with my DECT phone (which was near to the battery running out) to my corded landline phone and picked that up and said "sorry I was just changing phones there" whereupon the line went to unobtainable.  At the time I strongly felt this guy was worried I might then be recording the call and so that was why he hung up on me.  Obviously if they are making silent CLI withheld calls on this scale people will be wanting to complain to Ofcom or the ICO.  However without a CLI it is near impossible to do so unless you can actually get a manned call from the same people and find out who the outfit is.  BT's Nuisance Calls Bureau always refuses to reveal the CLI in this situation and if it is an Indian Call Centre they may not actually have one.  Also I am a WLR customer of yourcalls.net to further complicate matters so BT will probably refuse to help me for that reason too.

I have tried "Consumer Research Centre" and "silent calls" in Google and nothing is coming up.   If I try just "Consumer Research Centre" under a UK only search no useful hits about Silent Calls are being returned.

I wonder if our forum expert on these matters (SilentCallsVictim) or any other forum member could offer me any useful suggestions as to how to take this forward.  It remains to be seen if having called me but purposefully cut off the call when it was finally manned (as I probably sounded like a troublesome intelligent customer who would not fall for their scam) this outfit will now continue to make further silent calls.

Has anyone else had recent trouble with Silent Calls that then led to a manned called from someone in India saying they were from "The Consumer Research Centre"?

Since there is no CLI phone number presented there do not seem to be any entries about this call on www.whocallsme.com

CLI from overseas is considered unreliable and it may not be possible to use this to identify a company with the relevant overseas telco. Furthermore, it may be of no value.

If the Silent Caller has no UK or EU presence itself and cannot be shown to be acting as an agent for a company that does, then this activity is outside the range of Ofcom's jurisdiction, which derives only from an Act of the UK parliament. It would appear that CRI is a US company.

The ICO has made some efforts, with limited success, to achieve cooperation from US authorities on some extreme cases that breach both US and UK regulations. There are however no formal international reciprocal arrangements in place, outside those effective through the provisions of EU treaties (whether or not constitutional in their nature).


The general situation with withheld CLI is not so bad as it may seem. Telephone companies are able to place a "trace facility" on a line. This enables the true CLI of identified calls to be stored and accessed. The caller's right to privacy prevents this information from being released to the public, however it may be released to "appropriate bodies". In 2003 BT was persuaded to add Ofcom to its list of such bodies, which previously had contained only the Court Service and the Police.

This was very helpful to me in presenting my first formal complaint to Ofcom and it also had a significant bearing on the initial investigations conducted by Ofcom. Ofcom however is seen to no longer conduct investigations in response to complaints.


For those who wish to take extra personal measures to monitor unexpected calls, to record calls and avoid being bothered by Silent Calls and calls from those unprepared to say who they are, it is possible to spend money on a device that does this job rather well - www.truecall.co.uk. This is NOT "the answer" to Silent Calls, but it may be found to be of value to those who would like to have the benefit of a robotic personal assistant to take calls from unrecognised callers.


I hope this advice is helpful.

One would think that if they were unhappy with the response they received they would simply stop calling the same number as they had nothing to gain from doing so. They do not make money from simply being vindicitve. It may however be assuming too much intelligence on their part for any account to be taken of the reaction received.

I continue to recieve recording message calls from "the Debt Helpline" despite invariably speaking to an agent and asking for their full name and address, thereby causing them to hang up. The last exchange was interesting as the agent suggested that I review the provisions of the Telephone Preference Service. I was able to cap this suggestion by advising her to review the difference between the provisions of regulations 17 and 19 of the PECR.