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Ebay Suspends Phone Number Sales
wellingt writes "According to the
Jackson Sun, the attention brought by the sale of Jenny's famous 867-5309 has led Ebay to evaluate whether or not phone numbers are the property of their owner, and whether they can be sold. Verizon has made the claim otherwise."
Number portablity doesn't mean number transferablity. In order to get "your number" to move from Provider X to Provider Y, you have to show proof to Provider Y that you do in fact hold that number at Provider Y... if you go into Radio Shack with your buddy's phone bill and even with your buddy saying it's okay, you can't get his old number on your new cell phone.
So, there's nothing to sell on eBay. If you can't give it away even when you try, you can't sell it either.
They are. No sales of stolen property are ever valid. A clueless person who buys stolen property at a thief's yard sale not knowing the seller stole it still is in possession of stolen property.
That item can be taken from the unwitting buyer by the police and returned to the rightful owner, the person it was stolen from. If the buyer wants their money back, they have to sue the thief, which is usually a fruitless effort.
So, eBay's role is that whenever they realize that property's stolen, they've gotta kill the auction in order to maintain buyer confidence in their marketplace. They don't want transactions that aren't going to work happening over their system, simply because that'd undermine the trust people have in their system.
Why not? You can get ICQ numbers.
He may be laughing his ass off somewhere around here. The official site says that Tommy "pays his bills with work as a software engineer."
As someone that has had many different roommates, I can testify that this is true, at least with Qwest. All it takes is a phone call with both parties present. One presents his identifying information, tells that he'd like to transfer it to the person coming on the phone next, and hands the phone to other person for them to present their identifying information.
They have never asked why.
i do this quite a bit for my company, with verizon and cingular. here's an example: we hire a new sales person who's had his cell number for a gazillion years and doesn't want to part with it, but his provider/plan suck in comparison to our corporate plan, and we don't want to get stuck paying for a sucky plan/service.
we contact the phone company, request for an assumption of service in which the company now take on the financial responsibilities of the service contract. this usually take a tax id number, but between individuals you would use a social security number. once the billing is switched over in the company name, we port the number into our corporate plan.
if the employee leaves and wants to retain their phone number, the process is simply reversed. the process is easy, what's difficult is that each provider wants to lock you into their service plan. in the case of assuming an individual number into a group plan, since the group plan already exists, we're not bothered to sign any contracts. on the other hand, if the individual wants to break their number from our plan, they need to commit to a some type of time commitment( 1 or 2 year plan) before they can assume responsibility and service.
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin