No Whois Lookup for 800 #s

People often come to our site trying to track down the owner of a number, but unfortunately there isn’t any whois lookup to see the owner a toll free number. We have the phone company information for most numbers but they are the only ones that have the customer information.

You can subscribe to our advanced lookup and get the phone company information. That doesn’t guarantee you’re going to be able to get the customer information from the phone company. In fact there’s a very good chance you WON’T be able to get the customer information from the phone company, especially if you ask them for it.

That doesn’t mean you can’t get the phone company to slip and reveal some of that information. It’s not easy to do, but I generally find that the best way is to act like it’s your number. Call them up and ask why its not working. See if they will give you a little information in order to confirm it’s your account. Say yes and look up the city here they’re located and see if you can get that too. It may take several calls, and you need to write down the names of the people you talk to, but you can sometimes get the customer name and the city they’re in, which is usually all you need to track them down.

We only charge a one time fee of $8.95 to subscribe to our phone company lookup. After you order the secure 800 Lookup online you’ll get a receipt. It’ll give you an order ID. Go to the secure version by adding an S after http. Enter your order ID in the Username and leave the Password blank. That doesn’t give you the end user information but it does get you one step closer.

No '800' numbers available?

Out of the 7,690,000 possible 8-0-0 numbers, there are often times at this point when there won't be ANY true ‘800’ numbers in the SMS/800 spare pool at all. That’s right, none at all.

You might think that the lookup tool is broken or it’s just not showing them, but it’s not. It’s easy to check if the Instant 800 Lookup on our site is working by submitting a query for all *s with 8** for the area code. That will always return 10 ‘866’ numbers because that’s what it looks for first. If you don't specify what area code it'll start with the ones most likely to have more numbers available, 866 and 877. That makes sense from a database programming stand point, even if it doesn't really make much sense from a marketing point of view.

There are a couple solutions to this scarcity though. You can try searching after 1am (est) because the new numbers come out after midnight. So at that point most phone companies are still asleep but you can often get something. (My lookup isn't usable from 11:55pm until 12:20am though to get backordered numbers)

You can also use the nice numeric options in my numeric number section at http://www.TollFreeNumbers.com/6.shtml. Those are a little more expensive than the more readily available spare $49 numbers, ranging from $99 to 995, but at least there are a few good ones that are ultimately better than you would be able to get with the lookup tool directly.

Finally as a last resort, we can try to get you one random ‘800’ number from numbers that were reserved for 15 days and are scheduled to be thrown back into the pool. These are only $49, but you can't pick them, hence the term random. But we will do our best to help you in any direction you need to go to get a good number, activated quickly and transferring them to whatever company you want. The proof of ownership alone is worth way more than the $49 one time fee, no matter how much advertising they do.

Better Backordering

We've added a long overdue feature to the backorder process that allows backorders to be removed from availability after they're backordered. We've struggled with the management of the backorder list for some time, because the best numbers are often backordered by multiple customers. The more we've grown the bigger that issue has become. And since we can only accept a backorder from the first customer to request a number we often have to cancel backorders for numbers that have already been requested.

This means that if a number gives you a link to backorder it, unless it was just taken within the past couple days since the last update, it's really available to backorder. These databases are bigger than most people realize and since they are kept in several different systems processing changes turns into a nightmare, trying to keep everything flowing smoothly and quickly. But we've come up with a very important enhancement to the system so that we now suppress numbers that have already been back ordered from the 800 WATCH system. This will save a lot of unnecessary work on our part as well as a lot of frustration on the user's part.

This also means we really need to add a new product we've been hoping to add for a long time now, a Premium, Earlybird 800 WATCH. The regular 800 WATCH is truly one of a kind dd goes out to 20,000 or so people now, which means that the things on your list may be sent to thousands of people interested in this phone number business. That means that goes out to a select list of premium 800 WATCH subsides. We'll probably be announcing that advanced sign ups for that with a lot more next month.

As with everything we do, our goal is just to help you find the best possible and since things come and go all the time, this is the only real way to stay on top of all the possibilities. There is also a much higher turnover rate for this than there is for most other comparable items because it's harder to recognize good numbers than it is to recognize good domain names, for example. And this combined with some internal improvements in the backorder process should really make a big difference for our customers.

Telecom & Law enforcement reps

We've really only had the signup process available for the secure lookup that shows the phone company responsible for a couple days but it has been very exciting and interesting to see the variety of phone company representatives and law enforcement people that requested this access.

I've always said that my goal is to be a valuable resource to the industry. But it's really cool seeing people from the Paypal fraud department to the U.S. Secret Service signing up for it, not to mention the variety of phone company representatives.

New and Improved Dates

Did you ever have a conversation that started with "What if...." with a computer programmer? I have these occasionally with our main programmer, Bud Jay. We had a lot of fun and we wound up combining several what ifs and wound up with some great progress.

We not only fixed the dates but we wound up coming up with a way to collect a much more useful date. The dates we show now are the dates of the last change. We're not showing the original date it was set up any more like we used to. We're showing the date of the last change. That may not sound like much of a difference, but it really is much more helpful because it essenially shows you if anyone is paying attention to it.

When you see a number with a date of several years ago, that goes to a disconnect message, that's a huge sign that the number may be stuck or buried in their system. Mark Olson used to call them stranded numbers. They are worth pursuing, so get the phone company and call them. I'm also going to prepare something to explain how to talk with the phone company and get the information you need from them. There will probably be more information about this on the Vanity Lookup page, but these new dates are great!

The years given in Lookup are wrong

The years given in the Instant 800 Lookup may be wrong. We put them back again today, but many of the years seem wrong somehow. We have a bug in the programs and will work on it. It is showing too many '06s for some reason. We should have that fixed soon, but just don't rely on that for the time being.

Adjusting the 800 Lookup

We just added the year that the number was set up back into the 800 Lookup. The dates aren't always perfect because just changing something can make the date start over, but it does help sometimes to see that information. We had taken it off in response to the SMS800 attorney's request not to give out resporg information, but their finding that showing a number is active isn't really revealing resporg information leads us to believe that the length of time it may have been active really doesn't give much else.

The real reason this is important is that it makes the user who sees Active, Active Active Active on query after query feel that we are really looking it up more acurately. I also changed the term from "Already Active" to "In use" because that seems more easily understandable. It seems hard to understand why people don't understand what "already active" meant, but you wouldn't believe how many people ask me if that means they can get it. In use since XX is probably easier and my goal is to make it so easy that even the newest user understands it. And while I really try to get as many please to feel comfortable and want to contact us, I really want to minimize the number of obvious questions like that.

These little things probably don't matter much to anyone else, but it's this type of polished refinement that makes it such a great tool and resource. Kudos Bud Jay!

Secure Login via Order ID

I got the Christmas tree down today and we changed the login system for the secure 800 Lookup. The secure 800 Lookup shows the resporg information for most toll free numbers and is accessed at https://www.TollFreeNumbers.com. Your user Order ID is the username and the password is blank. Here's the new page that explains the subscription options: http://www.TollFreeNumbers.com/subscribe.shtml. I'll probably write something here about why you need this information and how to use it.

I charge $8.95 for a whole year of access. We don't really expect to make much money at this. If we wanted to make money from this we would certainly charge more or charge it monthly. We also wouldn't give the access away to the 10,000 best prospects (our current customers) and to all phone company and law enforcement representatives. It costs us over $20,000 a month to produce this and I don't think the subscriptions will amount to more than 2 to 5 % of that cost, if I'm lucky. But I think this is important because our success has come from providing a better resource and more honest and up front information. I think that's what customers want from an internet service today.

Enhancement: 3rd Party #s coming soon!

Here's an interesting thing we're starting to work on. We're going to add a new system that will allow customers to see potential vanity numbers that may be available from other parties. Vanity number owners will be able to give us a list of numbers and we won't promote them, but anyone that enters that specific number into the Instant 800 Lookup, will be told that it may be available from a third party and if they request information, we'll forward their information to the owner of that number. We should have the new logic in place for this within a month or by about the end of February!

The Advanced Toll Free Search Results

We have simplified the login system for the Advanced Toll Free Number Lookup. You still get to the new secure lookup by either adding an S after the http to make it https (ie http://www.tollfreenumbers.com) or just click on this url. When it prompts you for a password, you just enter any order ID from any order you've placed with us. Then when you use the Instant 800 Lookup it will give you the phone company information.

This information is extremely important in tracking down toll free numbers. It shows you which phone companies to contact for more information as well as providing the phone number if it's available. I will provide additional information about that soon. I just have to make the webpage for it first.