Happens in Australia quite a bit too. We use to get near daily calls at my last office from various recruiters asking to speak to anyone in technology pretending to be clients/partners then try to fish them for information on positions and people in the company who they would then follow up on directly.
It's fairly common in the UK - I get a few calls a month (largely because of big-ticket keywords on my CV that I've not got a huge amount of desire to work with again).
Sounds like that might run afoul of data protection acts. You should read up on your data protection laws and start quoting them to the recruiters who call, and possibly make complaints.
I used to get them at the office all the time; if my boss was in the room I would totally milk it. "No, I'm not available for work at the moment... Yes, it is a very rare skillset." Kept him on his toes!
Yes, this is quite common. For a while I was getting contacted almost exclusively through my Dice profile and even with a note that they should email me first, I'd still get called first extremely often.
