This was an interesting question I got from a visitor about someone who appears to be Flipping 800 numbers, or going out and reserving numbers and then trying to sell them.

Hi Bill,

I’ve been contacted by a young lady claiming to own the toll free number listed in the subject line of this email. She is asking for a significant amount of money to sell it to our company. I have the following questions for you:

1. Does this number appear to have an owner currently? If not, how do we go about purchasing it.
2. If she is indeed the owner of this number, what do we need to do in order to purchase the number and transfer ownership into our company name?

If you could please get back to me at your earliest convenience I would really appreciate it.

David Freeburg

Hi David,

It looks like someone activated the number 888-SLABJACK out of the spare pool (which we charge $49 for) and suddenly wants a significant amount of money for it. I think this is a good example of why the FCC has regulations against hoarding and brokering. The number does have an owner, but it’s probably not an active end user in the regular sense. They just picked it up for the purpose of reselling it to you, which happens to be the definition of 800 number brokering.

Fortunately with a unique, fanciful or at least uncommon term name like Slabjack, there probably aren’t going to be that many takers. It’s not llke a generic term that applies to the whole industry. So if you don’t want it, or won’t pay the artbitrary price they selected they probably won’t get anyone else to pay for it either. That means they may let it go for a lot less if you wait or they may just drop it all together. So whatever you wind up doing, time is on your side. And you have to realize that they have about $20 worth of time invested in it, at the most.

Generic terms are a little different because there are enough other prospects that they are more likely to find someone else interested in it. But time is still on your side, because no matter what they tell you, they don’t have people falling all over themselves to get it. The other option is to get their whole offer documented as much as possible and then file a complaint with the FCC. In a blatant case of hoarding the number and brokering it they may turn over the number very quickly to make the complaint go away.

To answer your second question, it’s not hard to transfer the number. They will either refuse and want to rent it to you (which is probably not a good idea) or they’ll be able to do the transfer. It would be kind of dumb to offer the number without knowing how to turn it over. I’m guessing this isn’t the first number they got and tried to market like this. If you have any difficulty we can help you but if you’re trying to transfer it I would go with whatever they’re suggesting.

Bill Quimby

Below is the Resporg History for the number too. The resporg DIC is Direct Connect Communications. The primary resporg contact is Beverly Forfar. (was that the person contacting you?)

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