When Vanity Number businesses get access into the national 800 database (referred to as Resporgs) don’t have the same business model as regular phone companies. They literally play by different rules. I’ve been in this business for 15 years and I’m going to share some of the biggest secrets of the vanity number business. This will make a lot of people very angry with me, but it’s time to pull back the curtains in a few dark areas of this crazy little business.

1. Vanity Number Resporgs don’t have to wait for Customer Requests.

Regular phone companies wait for customers to request numbers and then check to see if they’re available. Vanity number resporgs not only don’t have to wait for requests, but they look at what’s coming out ahead of time and grab good numbers the same second they become available or in some cases even before they’re available through the old phone company. So over time, vanity number companies get almost all of the good numbers coming out.

2. Vanity Number Resporgs get to keep the value of any numbers they get.

If a regular phone company does get a valuable number for a customer, the customer gets the value, not the phone company. And the same customer will switch to another company to save a penny per minute. Regular phone companies literally have no incentive to get good numbers for their customers. Vanity number companies have a huge incentive to get valuable numbers because they get to keep the value of their numbers.

3. Vanity Number Resporgs claim ownership of the numbers so they don’t have portability.

Regular phone companies have to try to keep customers by doing a good job. Vanity number resporgs claim to be the end user in order to get around having to release numbers for the actual customer. They think the rules of portability simply don’t apply to them. And don’t think the scam of claiming a sister company technically owns them is anything other than a painting the pig a different color. It’s still a pig whether it’s pink or brown.

I’ll show you the number of numbers released by the vanity number resporgs in a different article compared to the number of numbers released by regular phone companies. But believe me when I say that you can count the releases on one hand from a company with over a million ‘800’ numbers, while regular phone companies release numbers all the time.

4. Vanity Number Resporgs claim to do “shared use” in order to get around regulations against hoarding and brokering numbers.

Vanity number companies often use “shared use” as an excuse to grab up thousands or tens of thousands of toll free numbers (or more!), and just wait for someone to come along and want them. Another word for that is hoarding, which is taking more numbers than they have a need or use for. They don’t have to have any customer requesting them because they just claim that they are the customer or a sister company is the “owner.” Then they just sit on them waiting for someone to come along and want them. Most “shared use” companies have way more numbers than they have customers and only a small fraction of the numbers with a customer actually have more than one customers.

5. Vanity Number businesses charge much more than regular companies.

Regular phone companies charge a pretty minimal monthly fee of $2 to $10 per month, while Vanity Number businesses often charge $100 per area code or market up to thousands of dollars per month for their numbers, even if they got the number out of the spare pool because the customer requested it, just like a regular phone company does. They just charge 100s of times as much.

Regular phone companies release numbers for free. They have to try to keep customers by doing a good job. Vanity number companies use shared use as an excuse to “rent” numbers. Some “shared use” companies also sell numbers by allowing customers to pay several years in advance (typically tens of thousands of dollars) in order to allow them to be transferred away. Otherwise, they claim ownership so the customer can’t ever transfer the number away to another company, no matter how expensive the service becomes or how poor the service.

6. Vanity Number companies use their look up tools to trap customers.

Regular phone companies allow customers to check the availability of numbers on their website at no cost or obligation. They don’t automatically reserve numbers that they find available so the customer has to get them from them. Most vanity number businesses that provide a look up tool which searches the national database, automatically reserve anything they find.

This is even worse when you consider that they also claim ownership of the numbers and don’t release numbers or charge thousands of dollars to release the same number that the customer could have gotten for little or no cost if they didn’t look it up on the vanity number resporg’s site. It’s no wonder that most vanity number resporgs put the look up tool prominently on the site and the details of their service buried. They want to get the benefit of customer’s thinking they’re a regular phone company in order to trap them. (Yes this point is specifically about CustomTollFree.com but it also relates to some others as well.)

Vanity number resporgs combine the rights of phone companies with the rights of the end user in order to get around nearly all the regulations. They also try to look like regular phone companies to the public but don’t pay taxes or follow any of the legal requirements of phone companies.

Full Disclosure: TollFreeNumbers.com falls some where in the middle on points 2 and 5. We do charge slightly more for some more valuable numbers, but our rates aren’t based on the value of the numbers, trying to get as much as we can for the more valuable numbers. We charge a little more because we try harder and put in more resources than regular phone companies do to get good numbers for our customers. But that’s not the same thing as keeping the full value of the numbers.

You could also say we charge more than a regular phone company, but that’s only because regular phone companies don’t charge anything for getting numbers. They use the profit of the ongoing service to cover the cost to set up numbers, and we don’t sell the ongoing service, so we have to charge for that time and effort. Actually most of the enhanced voicemail services that charge a fee for a vanity number or for transferring a vanity number charge more than we do to get them, so we are clearly charging an appropriate fee for the service we provide.

As far as the other points, we do wait for customer requests for most numbers. We don’t keep the real value of the numbers, we don’t claim ownership of numbers, and we don’t do shared use or pretend to be a regular phone company. We don’t charge excessive fees and we’re one of the few safe look up tools that doesn’t trap anyone.

Laying this out for the world to see isn’t going to win me any friends, for sure. This type of thing is the main reason a lot of people in the vanity number business trash talk me every chance they get. I don’t hold out a lot of hope that anyone or anything is going to change very much, but I love this business and think that someone has to stand up and say these things for the good of the industry.

If you have any suggestions on how things could be changed, post it here. You can do it with or without your name so add your two cents!

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