Over the past months I have had problems with other directories and marketing companies abusing my data and taking advantage of the small businesses who register in my directory.

The other day I set up a honeypot listing using fake details and my own telephone number. Within 5 minutes of registering I had received my first cold call and by the end of the day had received 3 other calls.

To make life harder for these cold callers I came up with an idea of no longer displaying telephone numbers and adding a pop up box to reveal the number, whilst doing this I had an idea, I set up a unique statcounter just to reveal how many people were clicking to find telephone numbers.

At the end of the day I went through my stats chacking for the same IP numbers  regularly clicking on different numbers.  From this, it looks like I have at least 3 big companies regularly scanning my directory, a couple of smaller companies, and a well known marketing company, who I cannot name.

I have now removed numbers temporarily to stop the cold callers harrasing people, and will be emailing all businesses registered to warn them about the tactics these cold callers are using.