Martin Lewis is urging Brits to do one thing if they hear an eight word message on a phone call.
The savings guru has issued a request on social media to see if service lines of companies like broadband providers, banks, government departments and more are doing all they can to help customers - or if they are trying to put people off calling for help at all.
The Money Saving Expert founder is on a mission to gather data to find out which institutions are the "most likely offenders" at sending out 'sorry we are experiencing unusually high call volumes' while customers wait to speak to a person.
He claims that many of these could actually be "lies" that go against consumer rights and has set up a page where people can report this, with thousands already having submitted reports.
Taking to Twitter on Monday, Martin said: "Please report 'sorry we are experiencing unusually high call volumes' messages. We've had 20,000 reports in so far to test if some firms (banks, broadband, mobile, energy, water etc) have this for EVERY call. Pls take 30s to report it here.
"We need to keep track over a few more weeks to nail down the patterns."
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Explaining why, he added in a second tweet: "The point of this is to see if they play the message consistently both through the day and over weeks. If they do then it is a LIE and may well breach consumer regulations, yet we need timed data to try and tie down who the most likely offenders are."
Many responded to Mr Lewis' tweet with their own frustrating experiences with different companies, with some subject to hour long wait times before they got to speak to a human being.
One person said: "Having recently having dealt with the admin for my late father I can confirm Gov departments are awful at this. They pickup immediately but it’s often 30-60mims before you speak to someone.
"Calls are often randomly dropped or cut at 17:30. This is why UK has low productivity."
A second wrote: "I always laugh when the voice says 'your call is really important to us', if that was true they’d employ extra staff to answer it."
"HRMC is the worst. An hour wait," penned a third. "They told me they were too busy to refund the money that they had taken off me. They mistakenly put me onto emergency tax which put a huge dent in my salary.
"I told them they weren’t so busy when they were able to take the money off me in error."
Yesterday, April 24, Mr Lewis issued an urgent warning to anyone with a Barclaycard ahead of a major payment change coming this summer. The company is reducing the amount customers must bay back, but he explained how it may cost more in the long run.
If you receive a 'sorry we are experiencing unusually high call volumes' message and want to report it to Martin Lewis, visit Money Saving Expert here to fill out the quick form.
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