Porn Company Hoards 800 Numbers

Let your fingers do the… wait, don’t. An anonymous phone-sex company in Philadelphia now owns almost one quarter of the toll-free 800 numbers in the U.S. and Canada, according to public records. Some of those numbers use familiar commercial names—1-800-Cadillac and 1-800-Whirlpool, for example—but others include the former phone number for a teenager AIDS prevention hotline. The company, PrimaryTel Communications, refused to comment, but the legality is difficult: it’s not illegal to offer phone sex, but it might be illegal to hoard so many numbers and route them to a single destination. Either way, it’s an impressive piece of work: it’s taken 13 years for PrimeTel to assemble its cache.