My parents are receiving lots of nuisance phone calls to their BT landline, in particularly marketing/junk/scam calls.
They’re reasonably savvy so i’m not too worried about that, but the frequency is irritating (maybe 1 or 2 a day).
What’s the best way of tackling this?
They would prefer not to change their number because they’ve had it for decades…
BT take this quite seriously. I’m not sure how effective they are. I guess it depends on whether the calls are legal or not, but they have info here
I don’t want to be this guy but…
Could they not just get rid of the home phone? It’s the only guaranteed solution.
I haven’t checked, but it could be cheaper, too.
They’re old and, for reasons I don’t understand, think landlines are ace.
I suspect the calls aren’t legal because they mostly seem to be from overseas and designed to scam my parents out of their money.
register with the Telephone Preference Service - it cuts out quite a few UK nuisance calls after the registration period
I’ve found the best way to be taken off these lists is to simply annoy the scammer…
Yeah, give me a second I’ll look for my documents and every so often flick through some papers by the phone; see how long there stay on the line.
Winds them up and takes time away from them scamming anyone else. 
Does this really work? I imagined that they would be more inclined to schedule you in for even more calls just to annoy you.
BT call protect will definitely help and the block lists are constantly updated based on patterns so for free it should be a no brainer really 
All they care about is scamming money, once they know they won’t get any there’s no point in them calling back.