Welcome to the Phone Sex FAQ. This document will hopefully answer a lot of questions you may have about the many ways to get your rocks off with a telephone call.
Although erotic phone chat has been around for as long as people have communicated by telephone ("One ringy-dingy...two ringy-dingy...Gracious, hello! Mr. Vidal...what am I wearing now? I've got a short pink teddy, and my nipples are hard thinking about you. ")
At some point a light bulb went on in some enterprising entrepreneur's mind and s/he decided there was a way to make money talking dirty on the phone. Before the days of the infotext (pay-per-call) industry
phone sex operators would receive payment in advance of a phone call or have a credit card number on file for a regular sex caller.
976 phone numbers changed the face of the Phone Sex industry. With this special exchange the owner of the
phone sex business could establish a per-minute rate and let the phone company handle the billing and collection. The industry earned a black eye early in the game when preadolescent boys racked up thousands of dollars in charges calling Phone Sex operators.
When abuses appear, regulation soon follows. Many phone companies, fearing adverse publicity, either discontinued 976 programs or simply refused to collect for those calls. "976" soon became synonymous with "phone smut," and those numbers all but died out.
A desire for a positive public image soon lost out to desire for the revenues possible from pay-per-call business. The 900 exchange was born. The owner of the phone information business (the "Information Provider," or "IP" for short) would lease a line or group of lines from AT&T or MCI.
Enterprising IPs discovered that people would pay anywhere from $1.00 per minute up to $50.00 per minute if they could get the sex information they sought. Software companies whose tech support departments were swamped discovered that their users were more than willing to pay $3.00 per minute to get technical questions answered without long waits on hold.
Late night callers could call their own personal psychics at the urging of various movie or recording stars. Baseball players were setting up their own 900 numbers to get calls from adoring fans.
Phone Sex entrepreneurs jumped back into the fray as well. Soon there were full-color beaver shots showing up in Hustler and Penthouse urging the reader to "Call me my pussy's hot for you now..." Callers were willing to pay in some cases hundreds of dollars for a call to one of these gorgeous, horny Phone Sex operators.
As more and more IPs jumped visibly into the tele-phone sex business, the telephone companies were faced with the same old image problem. They knew they would not be able to shut down those operations, but the would be able to make life a lot more difficult. They did this by leasing these lines with a number of conditions. The most important of these was that they would not bill or collect for 900
phone sex lines. The IPs were now forced to turn to alternative, third-party billing for these calls. From a practical standpoint this meant that an IP could not be sure of collecting for any call made, since the telephone company would not disconnect the caller's service for an unpaid 900 bill. The rate of chargebacks increased dramatically.
In the face of these difficulties there are a number of alternatives in Phone Sex. This document will explore some of them.