05.27.08
Definitely too cheap to call for phone sex
This is amazing to me. A Japanese man was arrested for calling a food company’s toll-free number 500 times in 16 months for a total of 3,100 hours worth of free calls, costing the company ¥ 4 million, £19,500, or $38,752. They are checking to see if he has done the same thing to other companies as well.
I guess he has a “recorded female voice” fetish. Or he’s a frickin’ cheapskate. Or both.
Yeah, the people at the other end of the toll-free number are paying for the call, which is why we have the ability to block cheap wankers who want to waste our time by calling to hear us say “hello” or who call looking for a menu of sexy voice recordings to listen to.
But, um, that’s not only a lot of money. It’s also a lot of time spent on calls. It’s 6.2 hours per call. Every damned day. They’re also paying .21 a minute for their toll-free service, which may be the going rate in Japan, but it’s way out of line in the US to pay that much for toll-free service.
It’s 186,000 minutes. I earn $1 a minute and up, and if he calls I won’t sue him. I promise. I might even give him a special rate if he pays up front for the whole thing.