Jason Trost’s Blog

In the States, phone companies offer 1-900 numbers which cost money for the caller to make. They are generally reserved for sex lines and scam artists. In the UK, they are used for customer service lines. For reasons I have yet to understand, almost every business’s customer service number and many professionals (including lawyers who charge upwards of £400/h) will only offer customers an 0845 number, which is euphemistically referred to as a non-geographical number. Aka “Special Services: Lower Rate”, “local call” and “Lo-call”. It can cost up to 25p a minute to make such a call. For example, I need to order a Letter of Introduction from my bank. They charge me £15 plus the fees to make the call. If I need to report an outage on my Virgin Broadband, they charge me to call that line (and will refund you should it be their fault, but that’s not always easy to prove). There’s a great website called Say No to 870 which will let you find the normal number to call some businesses. Here’s a good explanation of the mess: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0845, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0870 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_Geographical_Numbers.