Getting a vanity phone number with four consecutive digits

I had a UK mobile number that had seven consecutive digits (e.g. 079* 444 4444). I got it through a friend who worked in provisioning at a new mobile operator that had just been assigned its new number blocks.

The problem was people would constantly try to "steal" the number. Four or five times a year my phone would just stop working because someone had "persuaded" a call-centre worker at my provider to assign the number to a new SIM they could sell on eBay. Apparently people pay a LOT of money for vanity numbers.

No matter what additional "security locks" they put on my account it kept getting hijacked, so eventually I just got a new (much less interesting) number.

One of my YC batchmates had his company acquired by Google. They quickly shut down his product (shocking!) and had him product manage Google Fi instead. He gave me access to the beta about 7 years ago. At that time, you could search for any string of numbers and it would let you see available numbers containing that string. I was able to get a number with 4 consecutive zeros in it and to this day it brings me joy every time I see or share it. Most people are not as amused but every now and then I'll meet someone who lights up when they see it. Without fail, they were also a math nerd growing up. I guess numbers tickle some people's brains differently.

It took me longer than I'd like to admit to realise the author meant "repeating digits" when they said "consecutive digits" - I was scouring the examples for "1234" etc.

This is a neat idea!

I've had a non-vanity phone number with five consecutive (non-repeating) digits for over 25 years. Even before the advent of phone spam and robocalling, it was receiving a lot more calls than my other phones. Many of the calls were from kids playing with a phone. It seems to be more likely than not that people press consecutive digits when dialing a "random" phone number.

Separately, I once bought a cell phone in a city with a brand new overlay area code, and they gave me this number: 424-210-0000. They were really surprised when I told them that I did not want it and had them port my old cell phone number to it instead. I suppose I could have kept it and then sold it to someone else. Apparently such things have value to some people, mostly businesses.

I just bought one off eBay, cost ~$100. Totally pointless but what’s an overpaid software engineer to do with their money if not vanity.

My wife got her phone number (randomly) many, many years ago that turned out to be the old number for "The Edge" radio station and got calls for years about people trying to request songs or answer trivia questions. Just some of the things that happen when you have one of those easy to remember numbers which are usually owned by taxi companies or pizza places.

From the article: >One drawback is that it’s not really integrated fully in your phone - for instance, iMessages to that number won’t work, and the calls need to be made through the app.

That sucks! I wonder if there’s a way to fix that.

As for memorable phone numbers, one of my buddy’s parents had a phone number that was XXX-YYY-0001 and boy was that helpful when I got arrested and couldn’t remember anybody else’s number.

Pro Tip: Memorize a few people’s numbers!

On a similar note, if you ever need to provide a (US) number for a discount and they don't verify it (like at grocery stores) you can almost always just use a 555 number [1] in the format:

  XXX-555-01XX

These are designated as "fake" numbers and are used in TV and film when they need to show a number on screen but don't want to open up some random person to prank calls.

Also, these numbers are almost always going to already be registered in a rewards program:

  XXX-555-5555
  555-555-5555
  XXX-867-5309

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_(telephone_number)

I had one a long time ago i liked, from Google iirc, something to the effect of 454-5451 (but different, ofc). To which i would rattle off "45 45 45 1" and confuse the hell out of every listener i was trying to convey the phone number.

As much as i loved it, i stopped using it because of how confused it made literally everyone i gave it to in my unexpected format haha. The novelty wore off when i would inevitably have to repeat myself in the normal format.

The ISP I use in the UK [0] has VoIP offerings too, and they let you search for a pattern of numbers. We've got several similar numbers for our businesses and some fun 1234 patterns too. Very memorable!

[0] https://aa.net.uk/

I got a memorable phone number a while ago. Websites like numberbarn.com make it relatively easy. A key realization I had is that repeating numbers aren’t the thing to look for, because they’re what everybody is depleting and marking up, and actually aren’t a very good proxy for what you really care about, which is memorability and maybe aesthetics. For example, 34567 is better than 37771, and also more likely to be available and cheap. Repeating digits and their associated markup are also about typability, but that probably barely matters to you if people are almost always calling from their address book.

I had a friend in high school who was randomly assigned a mobile number that contained exactly two digits - 3 & 9 (excluding the +1 for the US country code.) Over a decade later, it’s one of the few phone numbers I can remember off the top of my head where the person isn’t in my immediate family.

Before someone does this, consider one possible risk. People can easily remember vanity numbers. That is the risk.

I did this when I worked in a wireless provider and it was a mistake in my case. It was one of the factors that made me the go-to person for just about any problem and I was the default person to call for a myriad of issues. I was so happy to rid myself of that number. As a positive note this helped enforce a discipline in me to guide people to a ticketing system.

Many VoIP providers have ordering systems that let you do vanity searches, and some have APIs. Twilio is one. You can put down a few dollars to start an account, buy a number, and then immediately port it away to a mobile carrier if you like.

When I got my first phone number (circa 2000?), I asked for something memorable.

The operator rattled off 0427 151 181, which sounded fine enough. Then he pointed out it was my birthday - 15/11/81.

I think that’s pretty nifty, but what really impressed me was when I met my beautiful wife several years later - because her birthday is 27/11/81, so my phone number actually includes her date as well as mine.

When I signed up for GVoice it gave me the option to enter the last 4 digits and it would give me the number if it was available. I took advantage of this to make my phone number a palindrome (except for the area code).

Psh. My phone number, which I got a few years ago, has the first 6 digits of pi. :D

Took writing a script to brute force google voice, but totally worth it!

Fun fact: in the beginning of the 90's some Finnish telecom operators sold people short phone numbers, such as 050 1984. Today there exists a black market for these "lyhytnumerot" and if you want one, you'll have to pay thousands for it. But they exist and they still work.

This post reminds me of the chapter in Steve Wozniak's biography dedicated to his obsession with phone numbers. It details his favorite owned numbers and attempts to convince phone companies to sell him numbers that make have interesting properties when converted to binary.

When I was a CSR at old AirTouch Cellular I would look for cool numbers and when 999-9999 in Phoenix came available I snapped it up for my employee phone benefit. You can’t imagine how many wrong dials and prank calls you get. I gave it up after a month.

> and a nice number to give out when you don’t want to give out your real one.

I’ve setup a voip.ms number just for voicemail. Unanswered calls to my phone get redirected to that number after X rings (this functionality is baked into gsm). Then the voicemails get emailed to me so I never deal with my provider’s voicemail IVR.

So for people I don’t want to call me, I give them that voicemail number and it always goes straight to voicemail.

It’s also nice because I can still get and keep voicemails if I’m, say, out of country for 30 days because my provider deletes them after 10 or something days.

Easy to share and save voicemails automagically.

A friend used to have 256-512-1024.

My cat sitter's number legit ends in -0000. Couldn't believe it. She said it was just the number she was given.

When I and my friends in Toronto signed up for mobile phone service about 15 years ago, we simply got to pick our last 4 digits. I saw examples like picking the same suffix as their landline, picking a mnemonic for their name (e.g. MARY -> 6279), picking lots of trailing zeros.

I bought a DID on voip.ms with 5 consecutive digits. They allow you to search by any substring, though you can only search within a single area code, so it takes a little hunting and pecking to find a good one.

The author mentions it, but Burp Suite has both a "Repeater" and "Intruder" mode which can be used to do all of this without writing a single line of code.

For my oldest child, I used Twilio to search for something memorable in our crowded area code and then ported out to Number Barn. For the next two, I just used Number Barn directly to find two sequential numbers for them. Still have year and half before youngest gets the number ported to a mobile phone.

"4 consecutive digits". But the code is wrong:

  def contains_cons(num):
      for i in range(len(num) - 2):
          if num[i] == num[i + 1] and num[i + 1] == num[i + 2]:
              return True
      return False
    
  assert not contains_cons("+1234567000")

My vanity phone number has the year I was born and 6502, the CPU in my first computer.

Much like the other posters, I have fond memories of my landline number growing up, which ended up in the format abcb bbbd which made it incredibly easy to both remember and rattle off when making take-away orders…

Similar, have a landline with (areacode) ABB-0-ABB When giving it out I'm almost always told, 'wow thats easy to remember,' exactly why I chose it. Unfortunately (AC) AC-0-AC was not available

Anybody can find a pretty cool number if they don't care about the area code. Now play in "hard mode," which is to obtain a memorable (800) number.

No, (844) or (855), etc, don't count.

In high school my friend got the number 500-0001 and I was always so jealous. But I think the number has become kind of irrelevant these days.

whilst the author seems to have partially corrected it, it seems this applies to many commenters here as well:

consecutive != repeated

Pro tip: don’t hit a private API in a loop without any delay like the author.

> I went through and bought a dummy number to figure out how to purchase the number programatically, and then did the same method as above to purchase it.

This guy is going a little hard on the automation at the end there, what's the point of automating a one-in-a-lifetime task?

Just buy the one number you want instead of the dummy number and you're done.