I’m glad to see more action is being taken on this.
Over a decade ago, I worked in a shop that involved handling phone numbers, and at the time there were constant stories of co-workers starting relationships by initiating a conversation as a “customer satisfaction follow up” to their experience that day.
Keeping those people in line was a tale of someone getting decked by a customer’s father after doing this.
I used to work for a contact centre doing tech support, and one of my colleagues did this (keeping it deliberately vague because there’s a BBC news article about it floating about), and it was huge news at the time - noted down a woman’s number and started trying to flirt with her afterwards. It caused a massive drama, and widespread data handling regulations where introduced in the wake of it.
Now, it seems to be almost normal, if the 30+% figure is accurate.
What is wrong with these people?
That number (for London) is so high it’s pretty outrageous. It suggests this happens but a lot of people don’t mention it (at least to me) - only example I can think of is a friend got a few quotes to get the bathroom redone and one guy started getting sufficiently flirty that they just blocked him. There was a feature on the radio (presumably Women’s Hour) about how female plumbers and electricians are getting so many enquiries that they can’t even pass the work on to other women in the trade (of which there are still embarrassingly low numbers) as they’re all fully-booked to.