You are just about to sit down to relax for your evening meal and the phone rings. Should you leave it? No, it might be important.

“I am calling about the accident that you have had within the last two years” says a voice. “You might be entitled to up to £3000 in compensation”.

“What accident?” you think. You and thousands of others. The call could be during the day whilst you are in the middle of something important. There is never a convenient time for this particular interruption.

It often makes matters worse that the calls are made by young people who do not really seem to have a clue what they are doing, other than reading a script and following standard prompts.   

You may be able to resist the temptation to lapse into any number of responses, ranging from expletives to putting the phone down. You may know how to deal with the situation. But what if you are elderly, or vulnerable, or just not used to dealing with this sort of call?

There are rules that govern cold calling and spam texting. Solicitors are not allowed to cold call, but claims management companies (CMCs) are allowed to do it, within certain rules and guidelines for their industry. Unfortunately, these rules can be difficult to navigate.

So, our new ‘Can the Spam!’ social media campaign is aimed at making it easier for people to report unwanted calls and texts – all you have to do is send the details to us and we’ll pass them on to the regulator for you. Have a look at our cartoon on our campaign page for more details: http://www.apil.org.uk/canthespam. Tell your friends and family about it and help us to get rid of this epidemic of nuisance calls once and for all. It is exploitative, tasteless and misleading. It raises false expectations of ‘easy money’ and preys on vulnerable people.

Of course, the best thing the Government can do to stop all this is to ban cold calling and spam texting from personal injury claims entirely, and we are asking the Government to do just that. We know that the Government associates cold calling with fraudulent personal injury claims so you’d think a decision to ban the practice would be an obvious one.

In fact we warned the Government ten years ago that conduct rules for claims management companies were not stringent enough. We said loopholes would be exploited. We said all cold calling should be prohibited in relation to personal injury claims. The then-Labour Government did not listen then and subsequent Governments have failed to listen since.

We hate to say we told you so.

So, until we can persuade the Government to ban cold calling altogether for personal injury, we need you to get involved in this campaign to make sure the rules are not flouted – help us to ‘Can the Spam!’