A Company Selling Call-Blocking Devices Made 758,053 Nuisance Calls

A company that made its money promising to protect older people from nuisance calls has been fined £190,000 for hounding them with hundreds of thousands of nuisance calls of its own.

The Information Commissioner's Office said Elderly Aids Ltd, which sells call-blocking devices, made 758,053 cold calls between May 2024 and February 2025 in order to sell its products.

The complaints

Around 20 complaints reached the ICO and the Telephone Preference Service, the register that prevents numbers from being cold-called. Some described callers as aggressive, misleading and frequently unwilling to identify themselves.

One complainant said the company was "overcharging for call-blocking services that they aren't authorised to sell — my father was persuaded to sign up to pay £139 upfront and a £6.99 monthly fee."

The ICO described the company as "bombarding people with the very nuisance calls it claimed to protect them from."

Complaints about the company were made to the Information Commissioner's Office and the Telephone Preference Service. Photograph: Edhar Yuralaits/Alamy

The response to investigation

When the ICO began investigating, Elderly Aids repeatedly ignored requests for information while continuing to cold-call people. The company then attempted to strike itself off the Companies House register once it became aware it was under scrutiny, and is now registered at a default address.

"Not only did this company target vulnerable people who had explicitly asked not to be called — they harassed them to sell call-blocking devices," said Andy Curry, head of investigations at the ICO.

"EAL showed a complete disregard for the law and the people they were hounding. This penalty should serve as a clear warning to any business that thinks the law does not apply to them — we will hold them to account for both exploiting people in this way and trying to avoid accountability."

The business model, stated plainly

Stripped of the irony, this was a coherent commercial strategy rather than an accident.

The product was a solution to a problem the company was itself creating, sold to people identified as vulnerable to precisely that problem, through the channel they had explicitly asked not to be contacted on. The call to someone on the Telephone Preference Service was not a targeting error. Registration on that list is a signal that the person is bothered by nuisance calls — which makes them the best prospect for a call-blocking device.

Why the ratio matters

Twenty complaints against 758,053 calls is the figure worth dwelling on.

Enforcement in this area depends almost entirely on people reporting, and the population being targeted is the least likely to know how, or that the ICO exists. The penalty reflects the scale of the calling rather than the volume of complaints, which is the right approach — but it only works when a regulator can establish the call volumes independently.

The attempted dissolution is the other lesson. Striking a company off the register is a routine administrative act, and it is a well-worn route out of an investigation. That it failed here is worth noting; that it was tried at all says something about how easily it usually works.