Who will put a stop to nuisance callers flogging appliance warranties?

Despite some of the worst culprits being fined by the data regulator for targeting elderly and vulnerable people, nuisance callers continue to badger the public about renewing household appliance warranties. 

Which? first warned about misleading calls from appliance repair firms back in 2018. We continue to share intelligence with Trading Standards, which has described interconnected call centres selling misleading white goods warranties as ‘multi-million-pound consumer fraud’, yet the calls keep coming.

Here, we look at the tactics used in these nuisance calls and explain how to avoid them.

Appliance warranty nuisance calls 

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has issued fines totalling £1.6m to 19 appliance repair firms since March 2022. However, when we checked earlier this year, only three had paid their fines in full. 

Regulatory action hasn’t scared many off. This year, there have already been more than 60 reports sent to our scam sharer tool about firms calling to sell repair cover for electrical and white goods such as televisions and washing machines.

At best, people find these calls irritating but see through the lies about needing to renew their warranties. Others are caught out because they mistakenly assume these are genuine calls from existing providers, such as Domestic & General and SSE. 

The most concerning reports, though, are from distressed family members who discover their elderly loved ones have paid random companies thousands for cover they didn’t need.

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'It started with a marketing call'

Sam Carter, 37, from North Yorkshire, contacted Which? after inadvertently sharing his bank details with a company called HomeShield Direct Ltd in June 2024. 

The company appears to provide genuine cover for home appliances. However, Sam believes he was deliberately misled during this phone call. 

It started with a cold call from a marketing company called Opinion UK, from the phone number 01603 385218. 

National Trading Standards said that this number called 172 trueCall users in the space of one day in June 2024. Of these, 96% were on the telephone preference service (TPS), which means the calls were unlawful, although Sam wasn't TPS-registered at the time. 

The Opinion UK caller already knew his name, address and mobile number. He was distracted and mildly irritated by the interruption, but briefly answered a few questions about the age and brand of his washing machine. 

Sam was told the call was for marketing purposes – and HomeShield Direct was mentioned by name twice – but having listened to the recording of this call, we agree with Sam that both were easy to miss. This is partly due to the speed and accent of the caller, but also because Sam has an auditory processing disorder (APD), although neither Opinion UK nor HomeShield would have been aware of that when they made their calls.

Which? attempted to contact Opinion UK, using the details listed on its website, but received no response.  

The sales call from HomeShield Direct

Sam told us he'd forgotten all about this first call when the phone rang again two days later. 

‘This caller claimed my warranty was expiring and that he could renew it for £9 a month. As I currently have a warranty with Domestic & General, I thought he was calling on behalf of them and agreed to it.

‘I contacted Citizens Advice and then Trading Standards, expressing a worry that my information had been shared without my consent. I also stated that I was given the impression that my warranty was expiring which was incorrect.’ 

‘What I am most concerned about – something that other reviews have focused on – is that HomeShield Direct has consistently stated to people that their warranty is expiring. I am lucky that I managed to spot the problem early.’

Which? has listened to a recording of the sales call. Although the adviser does state that he's calling from HomeShield (at the beginning and again towards the end of the call), we think the rest of the conversation is less than transparent – and in our view, perhaps deliberately so. 

For example, while the adviser said that he was calling from HomeShield, he didn’t refer to the Opinion UK call or explain what HomeShield is. He then seemingly proceeded to talk to Sam as if he had an existing warranty with HomeShield. 

Sam wrongly assumed the call was related to his existing policy with Domestic & General, which was due for renewal only a couple of months after the call. 

‘My elderly friend paid £10,000 over two years’

Sam is by no means alone in raising concerns about HomeShield Direct. 

We’ve received 10 complaints about HomeShield Direct stretching back to December 2019. The complaints accuse it of harassing elderly, vulnerable people and mis-selling expensive plans without any appropriate due diligence checks, such as checking if the person has existing cover. 

We first became aware of the company when Which? member Emma discovered that her father-in-law had 28 direct debits to 21 different ‘appliance repair’ companies – including HomeShield Direct – altogether totalling more than £1,000 in the month before he died. Multiple policies with different companies covered the same appliances, and the payments only ceased upon his death and the closure of his bank account. 

She told us: ‘We believe these companies sold policies by hounding my partner's father with unsolicited phone calls, and once they had his details, sucked him into taking out policies to cover other items. While at his house for approximately 24 hours we received five such phone calls.’

Many other reports were from loved ones of people with dementia and other memory problems, including Eleanor who found out that her elderly friend was making recurring card payments to HomeShield Direct and 32 other firms.

She calculated that she had paid out around £10,000 over two years, £2,409 of which went to HomeShield for six policies between January 2019 and September 2020. These apparently covered her washing machine, fridge freezer, hob and oven, television, microwave and extractor fan. 

‘I believe these firms realised they could manipulate her to take out further policies, which were actually not necessary, as she already had house contents insurance – aside from the fact that she had the money to replace these inexpensive items. I was also witness to the tactics used when I started answering the numerous calls she received and let them think I was her.’

Which? is worried that elderly people are naturally more susceptible to signing up for goods and services over the phone, particularly if they live alone and lack support systems.

The response from HomeShield Direct

When we asked HomeShield Direct about Sam’s complaint, it told us he willingly took part in the telephone survey conducted by Opinion UK, and it was clear from the outset that the call was for marketing purposes on behalf of HomeShield Direct. 

Regarding the second call from its own sales representative, it argued that they were transparent as to who was calling and clearly explained that HomeShield Direct would appear on his bank statement. It also said that the reference to an existing warranty and the cover being 'the same' was talking about the manufacturer’s warranty (although this would have ended around 10 years ago). 

The managing director of HomeShield Direct shared this statement:

‘HomeShield Direct Limited do not, nor have ever, engaged in conduct that would amount to the targeting of elderly or vulnerable individuals; indeed, it would be against my personal ethos, and the ethos of the company, to facilitate or support such behaviour. 

‘We work tirelessly to ensure the highest standards of practice are adopted by our staff, our 350,000 customers to date are a testament to the excellent and valuable service we provide. Any suggestion to the contrary is simply incorrect; in fact, HomeShield Direct Limited have robust safeguards in place to identify any potential vulnerabilities in customers and act swiftly to implement remedial action where vulnerabilities are identified.’

HomeShield also referred to Sam’s ‘unsubstantiated complaint’ to Trading Standards, which found that there was ‘absolutely no wrongdoing on HomeShield Direct’s part’. It added that no payments were ever taken, as his plan was cancelled when he complained, and he was subsequently added to its ‘Do Not Contact’ register. 

Cancelling policies when people proactively complain about misleading phone calls isn’t enough to convince us it's running an ethical business. We also spoke to Trading Standards about these issues and it told us:

‘Scam and nuisance calls are continuing to bombard UK consumers, with people who are situationally vulnerable and more likely to become victims. While we at the National Trading Standards Scams Team are unable to comment on individual cases investigated by individual Local Authority Trading Standards Team, we can say that these teams are having to cope with more complex investigations with reduced budgets. All Law Enforcement Agencies are being asked to do more with less.’