Reply To: Important changes to your IHG One Rewards Premium Credit Card – closing

[RussellH]

Lady London wrote:

RussellH 141 doesn’t just result in your number not being displayed at the other end. It used to stop blockage of your access to the ‘from another country’ contact number – as this embeds a local UK phone number you can see.

Many companies’ phone systems were programmed to detect if you were dialling the number for people abroad to use, from a local UK number. Instead of a UK number that they might have an earning arrangement on eg to keep part of the phoneco ‘termination fee’ within the call charge. But often these numbers can’t be dialled from abroad hence you’ll often see a different normal looking number for those dialling from abroad.

Concealing your number by dialling the code in front used to stop this blockage and the call would go through – whereas just dialling the number given for people dialling from abroad, even if using the +44, it wouldn’t go through if the receiving phone system was able to detect you were calling from the UK.

That may or may not have been the case in the past, but I have never seen it mentioned anywhere else, even though I have subscribed since the 1990s to a Usenet group where a number of phone no. geeks still hang out. In the past, a lot of useful tips for reducing my business phone costs over the years.

But since the use of expensive phone numbers (ie 084x and 087x as well as 09xx) was banned for Customer Services numbers some years ago, there is now no termination fee sharing anyway. But yes, back in the late 1990s and early 200os I managed to collect the huge sum of about £40 in termination fee sharing.
🙂