The ingenuity of the human race knows no bounds, especially, it seems, when it comes to exploiting opportunities.

We have all become used to the constant phone calls. Even when you block the numbers they still manage to get through. 

Both foreign and UK call centres hide behind spurious numbers that they somehow manage to generate that often identifies as a local number on the caller display. Answer it at your peril, give some rude response to the fishing for your details, hang up, and block the number. It doesn’t stop them because a few minutes later they call back hiding behind another cloned set of digits.

Some say we should sympathise with these people who have to do this for a living. My PR man takes a different view, literally blowing the whistle on them down the phone. 

An old friend of his used to tell the caller he was glad they’d phoned because he needed to confess the murder of his wife. That cleared the call faster than his “victim” could scream!

Now the PPI industry has bitten the dust, its perpetrators have hit on a new source of income – black mould in rented properties. 

How cynical that in a matter of days after the inquest into the death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak found that mould in his rented home contributed to his death PPI-style phone calls are now targeting tenants whose homes display signs of damp. The first I knew of this was when my lettings manager got just such a call on her home phone.

I suppose we shouldn’t be that surprised because that’s what modern technology has helped bring us. For all the good things there seems to be an equal number of bad ones such as phantom number generators and ever more ingenious ways of inveigling their way into our homes for these annoying callers.

So instead of callers asking if you’ve had an accident and want to make a claim, expect a string of “complaints” from tenants egged on by these claims companies. And, from what I’ve read in the past, it seems that once you’ve agreed to go ahead with them it’s impossible for claimant tenants to pull out without being landed with a bill for costs. 

Once locked in, they have to go on even if they realise there’s no hope of winning with honest evidence about their homes.

It’s a distressing and disturbing turn of events that we may well see more of as 2023 progresses.

* Colin Shairp is director Fine and Country Southern Hampshire and Town and Country Southern *