Lee Beaumont charged telemarketers to call him

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.

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.

Set up his own 0871 premium-rate number so telemarketers paid 10p a minute to reach him, flipping the billing system to make calls costly and stop them.

Setting up an 0871 number meant callers paid 10p per minute, with Beaumont receiving 7p.

The cost shifted from Beaumont to the caller, creating a financial disincentive for telemarketers.

Word spread among telemarketing firms that his number was expensive to dial, reducing call volume.

The setup cost only £12, recouped within two months, making it a cheap and effective solution.

When facing unwanted contact, look for existing monetization infrastructure you can flip to charge the sender, rather than just blocking them.

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.