How One Man Turns Annoying Cold Calls Into Cash

First time accepted submitter georgeaperkins writes "A man targeted by marketing companies is making money from cold calls with his own premium-rate phone number. So far he's made £300 profit following a £10+VAT initial investment. The premium rate regulator has 'strongly discouraged' the practice, as it violates the code of practice. Nevertheless, the novel idea is sure to resonate with everyone worn down by mindless cold calling!"

Comments

So Full Of Win!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is epic win.

Re:So Full Of Win!

[Zarjazz]

It's just a shame he could only make 7p/minute from it. What happened to £1/minute premium rate lines?

This isn't a new trick to me since I work for a telco that provides the infrastructure for a lot of these cold callers, I've seen it before.

The premium rate 09 lines you are talking about are separately regulated and abuse is prosecuted. However the guy missed an opportunity here. He should have actually chosen an 070 number which is allocated by Ofcom for use of Personal Numbering Services, these can cost 50p - £1 to call. But since they start 07 most people think it's just another mobile number.

Re:So Full Of Win!

[shortscruffydave]

It's just a shame he could only make 7p/minute from it. What happened to £1/minute premium rate lines?

Actually, going for a cheaper rate is a smart move. A lot of companies block outgoing calls to >=£1/minute numbers, but something in the region of 10p/minute could slip through those filters....that allows him to get - and make money from - calls that he might not get if he'd gone for a more expensive line. And yes, I agree - epic win

Billing bill collectors?

[dicobalt]

Now that's an idea.

Code of practice?

[korbulon]

Well I guess even whores have a code of practice.

Re:Code of practice?

[voss]

Comparing regulators to prostitutes is really unfair to prostitutes.

Re:Code of practice?

[Anonymous Coward]

taking pot-shots at the monumentally, epically difficult jobs of regulators is lazy comedy.

/ no, i am not a regulator, but I know what they do.

Re:Code of practice?

[FireFury03]

taking pot-shots at the monumentally, epically difficult jobs of regulators is lazy comedy.

/ no, i am not a regulator, but I know what they do.

I would have more sympathy if the regulator's response to flagrant law-breaking wasn't always simply to write a "stongly worded" letter to the company responsible, reminding them of their legal obligations. I dunno, but if I personally broke the law, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't get a letter reminding me that what I did was illegal and told not to do it again, especially if I'm doing the law breaking on a large and organised scale...

Conversation

[StripedCow]

"I'm calling because I'm selling this great new product that can save you time and money."

"Now that sounds very interesting! Could you hang on for a moment, I'll be back in a minute."

** leaves phone off hook **

Re:Conversation

[StripedCow]

Now, premium rate phone number or not, if this is how ALL people treated markteers, then there would be no more cold calling.
Quite simple if you think about it.

Re:Conversation

[Anonymous Coward]

I send back an email to confirm to the spammers that this is an active email account

FTFY

Re:Conversation

[marcansoft]

I started doing this after getting a dozen Vodafone marketing calls. Except instead of just leaving the phone off-hook, I said "please hold while I transfer you" and then treated them to an endless random shuffle of Never Gonna Give you Up, Friday, Trololo, Caramelldansen, and Nyan Cat, played via a voice modem.

They stopped calling after they got that a couple of times.

Re:Conversation

[jamesh]

"Hang on I'll just get my credit card" is likely to keep them waiting for longer

Re:Conversation

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the "From" address rarely is the true spammer's address, the answer mail will not inform the spammer about anything. If the mail address works, it will likely go to someone completely unrelated.

Re:Conversation

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. Because someone making minimum wage for 15 hours a week because they grew up in poverty and have no skill set doesn't deserve to be considered a human. Someone who can't find work anywhere but a temp agency and gets completely exploited as the company they're being contracted out to doesn't have to abide by the usual labor laws is most certainly not to be considered human.

When I order a burger from McDonalds, I'm ordering it from nigger-cattle. Apes. Certainly not humans.

Fuck off, ass hole.

Re:Conversation

[johanw]

Some poor people become pot dealers, some become telemarketeers. The difference between those two is that there is an actual demand for the services of the first.

I've done the same for years

[Captain Hook]

I've got a personal number which costs more to ring than a standard mobile line, I set it up for the similar reasons, after entering details of an accident when I renewed my insurance I got bombarded by ambulance chasers.

The only difference is that I don't get a cut of the call costs, I just wanted a way to give a telephone number on websites which comes through to my mobile phone but could easily be rerouted to voicemail off when the frequency of spam calls gets too high.

Family and friends all get my real number while all companies get the forwarding number so I know that sending everything from the forwarding number to voicemail isn't going to affect people I actually want to talk to.

Re:and why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

Premium numbers must always be accompanied by pricing information (consumer protection laws). This guy probably just puts his premium number into forms without giving pricing information.

Clear something up?

[Justpin]

In Hong Kong it costs money to receive calls, they call it a connection fee. Which means that people simply never answer calls to unfamiliar numbers. It there such a thing in the US? As far as I know there is no such thing as a connection fee in the UK.

Re:Clear something up?

[BlacKSacrificE]

That's going to be a great precedent and standard to set, especially when your daughter needs to use her friends phone to call you for help because hers just got trashed/out of credit/stolen.

"I don't know this number, fuck that!"

Re:Clear something up?

[heypete]

For landline phones in the US, the recipient does not pay unless they have a toll-free number (e.g. a 1-800 number). There's no connection fees for receiving a call.

Mobile phone numbers in the US are no different than landline phones for the calling party: there's no extra fee or anything for calling a mobile number. Calling a mobile costs precisely the same amount as calling any other phone number in that area code. The person with the mobile phone will be charged on a per-minute basis (unless they have an unlimited calling plan or it's during the "free nights and weekends" time that many plans offer) regardless of whether they are making or receiving a call.

This is different from, say, Europe, where mobile phones are assigned numbers in special mobile-only prefixes. The person calling a mobile phone pays a slight premium, while the person receiving a call on their mobile pays nothing.

Re:Clear something up?

[nine-times]

Your mobile numbers have geographic area based prefixes?...what part of "mobile" did you guys not understand?

People in the US generally aren't getting charged for calling different area codes. I suppose some people still get "long distance charges", but most people are in a plan where they only get charged for calling a different country, and even then sometimes they can call Canada for free or something. To a large degree, the "area codes" are being used now just to allow for more numbers.

In fact, lots of younger people don't have landlines, and only have mobile phones, and they try to keep their number throughout their lives. If you live in a major city, a lot of people you meet will have phone numbers from all over the country. The "area code" is no longer a good indicator of where you actually live.

Re:Clear something up?

[Miamicanes]

The FCC set aside areacodes for mobile phones, but somewhere along the line, they were discontinued as "prejudicial".

There was also a block of areacodes set aside for non-geographic personal numbers, but there was zero interest in them, because they gave you and your callers the worst of all worlds... you were charged for incoming calls as though it were a toll free number, and people calling you were charged as through they were making the most expensive domestic long-distance calls possible.

I remember that sometime around the mid-90s, there was a bug in the ESS switching software used by BellSouth (probably others too) that allowed you to create a chain of adhoc-forwarded numbers that began with a toll-free 800 number, and ended with a local premium-rate 976 number, because there was no control in place to stop you from doing it, and the 976 billing logic charged the originator of the call rather than the forwarder.As far as I know, the practice was never actually approved, and people who did it ended up getting the money taken away from them.

In the US, a leading '1' has ALWAYS signified your understanding that the number dialed isn't a local call, and might not necessarily be free. Back when areacodes always had 0 or 1 as the second digit, never as the first digit, and exchange codes (the 3 digits after the areacode) could not have 0 or 1 as the second digit, it worked something like this: Assume two Miami phones having numbers 305-222-2222 and 305-333-3333 and a Key West phone having number 305-444-4444:

Back when 7-digit dialing was allowed, 305-222-2222 could cal 305-333-3333 by simply dialing 333-3333. No 0 or 1 within the first 3 digits, so 305 areacode was implied, as well as its status as a free call. However, if 305-222-2222 called the Key west number, he had two choices: 1-444-4444 or 1-305-444-4444 (leading 1= non-free, no 0/1 second digit implies 305 areacode)

When 10-digit dialing was implemented to allow 786 areacode to be overlaid on Miami, 11-digit permissive dialing was enabled to avoid breaking compatibility with software and dialers that automatically added a leading '1' to any 10-digit phone number (yes, there were quite a few). So, 305-222-2222 could dial 305-333-3333 by dialing EITHER 305-333-3333 OR 1-305-333-33333. However, for calls to Key West, the 1 was absolutely required, so 305-222-2222 dialing 305-444-4444 would get a recording that the number was not local & required a 0 or 1 before dialing.

Cell phones threw a new monkey wrench into the equation, because they (usually) had much larger "local" calling zones. For example, if you were a Sprint customer, everything from Orlando south to Key West was classified as a "local" call, including numbers outside your area code. So 305-222-2222 could dial 407-934-7639 without the leading 1, since to a Sprint customer who was present within the switching area of the number being called, it WAS a local call. It technically incurred per-minute airtime charges, but didn't incur additional long-distance.

Where things got ugly was when you called people who were visiting with a mobile phone from another area. I don't think many people really understand what the billing logic was, because it wasn't a common scenario until the point when most mobile phones started to have the entire US as a local calling zone anyway. As I understand it, behind the scenes, if a Sprint customer in Miami called a Sprint customer from California who was in Orlando, Sprint's network would recognize that the caller and target were both handled by the Orlando switching center and complete it as a "local" call (even if the caller didn't have free long-distance anyway), but a landline phone (or non-Sprint mobile phone) in Miami would have gotten charged for the call to California, because their carrier would have terminated the call to Sprint's switching center in California, and Sprint itself would have transparently connected it to their Orlando switching center behind the scenes.

Re:Clear something up?

[rjstanford]

ObXKCD: http://xkcd.com/1129/

Re:and why not?

[Xest]

Businesses have often lobbied for codes of practice to be unenforceable so that nothing comes of them if they breach them so I doubt this is illegal, he'll just get a telling off from the regulator - as if he gives a shit.

It breaks the code of practice supposedly because you have to list pricing information alongside premium rate numbers and when he fills in the forms for his phone number etc. there is no form field to do this.

But I'm not convinced the code even applies, because the pricing information is meant for consumers and he's only giving these details to businesses who tend not to be covered by consumer protection laws (they're not protected by the sale of goods act for example).

I think this is more the regulator trying to avoid a headache than him actually doing anything wrong. I'd be surprised if any enforcement could actually be taken against him successfully which is presumably why the regulator has said "We advise against this" rather than "We're going to have a word with him and make him stop because he's breaching the code" - I suspect they're "advising" and not "acting" because there's actually fuck all else they can do about it but we'll probably find out before long.

Re:and why not?

[jamesh]

the forms don't have a space for the prices. They don't care about the price.

Then it would be against the code of practice to put your premium number on such a form.

Still... if it wasn't _your_ number, then I guess you couldn't get into trouble. You wouldn't receive a cut, but the idea of them trying to sell something to the girl on the end of the "naughty nun spank hotline" might give you a smug sense of satisfaction.

Re:Definition of Abuse

[Dishevel]

Except, as it says in TFA, the guy now "welcomes cold calls". I can see the point of slugging cold-callers with what is effectively a "fine", but once you go to the extreme of extending unsolicited calls just for the revenue, then that is just profiteering.

I am cool with that. If they do not want to pay him for his time they can choose to not call him.