Biz thrives on phone number trade

KOLKATA: A multi-million rupee industry, which thrives on trading mobile or land-line phone numbers in the city, may ensure that your number will never go out of circulation and you will never be out of reach of a caller promising you everything under the sun.
The Supreme Court may have taken a stern view of the intrusion into your privacy that unsolicited calls actually are.But that should not be reason for you to celebrate your freedom from spam on the phone for one simple reason: your number actually translates into money that''s big and this pie is shared by everyone except you in the great information-sharing bazaar.
The city, according to the Cellular Operators'' Association of India statistics, has more than 1.3 lakh GSM technology-using mobile phone-users. The number of fixedline users in the city would be 10 times that number. Add the number of wireless-in-local-loop users and those who use CDMA technologyusing mobiles and you are looking at a couple of million phone numbers.
It is here that the money factor comes in. Every agency that wants to sell you something (from a credit card to a water-purifier) buys these numbers from unscrupulous employees of other service-providers. So when the courier man comes in, delivers your packet and then asks for your fixed-line or mobile number so that "the company can check if you have really received the packet", you have no reason to trust that his plans are entirely philanthropic.
The man, for all you know, is asking for your number so that he can "sell" it to someone else. A mobile or land-line number in the city is worth Re 1. And, if both mobile and fixed-line numbers belong to the same address, the seller gets Rs 1.50 for the combo deal.
But the courier man is not the only one eyeing your number so that he can sell it. Numbersellers now come in every shape, say those in the information-sharing trade, with everyone handling multiple clients in a position to live off your number.
Unsolicited callers seem to have found a way to pester people following Monday''s Supreme Court notice. They have started calling on land-lines; the SC notice pertained only to cellphones, one pesky caller explained.