Will Spain's new plan to stop spam calls work?

Unfortunately, it’s very common in Spain to receive spam calls, either from energy companies trying to get you to sign up to new deals, phone and internet companies calling you to try and get you to change providers or scammers hoping you fall in their trap.

They’re so common in fact that many people simply won’t answer the phone these days if they don’t recognise the number.

Over the years, the Spanish government has tried to introduce several measures to combat the amount of spam calls such as the Robinson List and The Telecommunications Law, which came into force a couple of years ago.

READ ALSO: Why Spain's law to ban spam calls has failed

The Telecommunications Law stated that companies would not be able to call you unless you give permission and the Robinson List was a website you could sign up to in order to opt-out of receiving marketing calls and other communication.

Both of those haven’t worked, so the government has come up with a new plan to create an amendment to the Customer Service Law (SAC), which came into force on Saturday June 7th.

The change now means that commercial calls will now have to use landline phone numbers according to geographic location, specifically assigned for sales communications such as 800 and 900 numbers.

They will no longer be able to use ordinary mobile numbers like they have done up until now, making it impossible to tell who is calling you.

So, in the future, if you receive a sales call, it should be from a number with a special 800 or 900 prefix.

It also means all calls received from or made to customers service operations, will be routed through one of these numbers.

Does this mean that spam calls will now stop?

It’s hard to say – they may reduce, but probably not stop completely.

This is because if it’s a company trying to scam you or ones not playing by the rules, they won’t use these numbers because they don’t want to obey with the new regulation.

Also, there are several loopholes in the law that companies can get around.

Firstly, if you have ever signed up to a company or bought something from them and consented to giving them your number and to receive marketing calls, then it’s perfectly legal.

Secondly, is that a company can still contact you on the grounds of legitimate interest, if they actually believe that you want to receive this information because of something you bought or signed up to.

What can I do?

So, if they're not all going to stop - is there anything you can do about it?

Yes, you can choose just to simply not answer 800 or 900 numbers. If you do this, however, you could actually be missing calls from companies you’re already with and want to receive information about new offers that may affect you.

Also, if it’s simply a company disobeying the rules and spamming you, the operator can intervene and block the number, deeming it illegal.

Operators are required to block numbers that do not correspond to any user or service.

According to the Ministry of Digital Transformation and Public Service, an average of 235,600 calls and 10,000 text messages have been blocked per day since the beginning of March.

From June 7th, they have also been able to block calls and text messages originating internationally, but pretending to have come from a Spanish number.