#314 2011 · Lee Beaumont · Personal finance / telecommunicationsrisk-transfer
A Leeds man tired of cold callers made his own phone number cost money to dial — using the exact billing system built to profit off consumers like him
the problem
An individual has no practical legal recourse against unwanted calls from companies that bought or scraped their number, and blocking technology only prevents the call, it doesn't discourage the caller
background
UK premium-rate 0871 phone numbers were built and marketed to businesses as a way to charge consumers for calling in — a customer support line, a competition hotline — with the number's owner earning a cut of the per-minute charge. Consumers on the other end of that system were purely a cost center, dialing in and paying by the minute with no way to flip the arrangement around.
Lee Beaumont, a businessman in Leeds, was receiving over 30 unsolicited telemarketing calls a month from companies that had bought or scraped his personal number, with no practical way to stop them — blocking a number only stops calls from that specific number, and companies simply call from new ones.
the move
In November 2011, Beaumont spent about £12 to set up his own 0871 premium-rate number and gave it out as his contact number instead of a standard line. Callers were charged 10p a minute, of which Beaumont received 7p and the hosting company kept 3p — so every company that called to sell him something now had to pay him by the minute simply for the chance to pitch him, using the same billing infrastructure normally deployed against consumers.
the payoff
Beaumont recouped his roughly £12 setup cost within two months and, at his peak, reported earning around £7 a month from cold calls alone; more strikingly, his monthly volume of unsolicited calls dropped from over 30 to roughly a dozen once word spread among telemarketing firms that his number cost money to dial, with £300 in cumulative earnings reported by the time BBC Radio 4's 'You and Yours' covered the story in 2013. The UK premium-rate regulator, PhonePayPlus, publicly discouraged the practice and warned it could pursue complaints against both Beaumont and his hosting provider.
what came after
Beaumont's story was widely covered by the BBC, The Register, Fast Company and other outlets in 2013 and is cited in consumer-technology and behavioral-economics writing (including a Freakonomics blog post) as a folk-hero example of an individual redirecting an asymmetric billing system built to extract money from consumers back against the businesses that relied on it.
references
- [1]Punter strikes back at cold callers - by charging THEM to call HIMThe Register, 2013theregister.com
- [2]British Man Turns Tables On Cold Callers And Makes Money To BootFast Company, 2013fastcompany.com