Fake phone numbers

Hollywood's habit of saying "555" is older than any rule about it. In the Bell System the 555 central-office code was not handed out to subscribers — 555-1212 was, and across much of North America still is, directory assistance — so a screenwriter could use it without ringing anyone's house. The convention held until the industry wanted the code back for real customers. When 555 numbers began to be assigned commercially in the 1990s, the Industry Numbering Committee, an ATIS-sponsored body, withheld exactly one hundred of them: 555-0100 through 555-0199, permanently unassignable and reserved for fictional use. Those hundred, repeated behind any area code, are the only North American numbers that are genuinely safe to print.

The cost of ignoring the convention is well documented. Tommy Tutone's "867-5309/Jenny" reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1982 and sent callers to whoever happened to hold that line in their own area code; the calls kept arriving for decades, and holders of the number have described changing it to get away from them. Songwriter Alex Call has said there was never a real Jenny and that the number simply scanned well, which makes the many "I knew the girl" stories apocryphal. In 2003 Bruce Almighty put 776-2323 on screen as God's phone number, with no 555 prefix to protect anyone, and real subscribers from North Carolina to Colorado began fielding calls; Universal replaced it with a 555 number for the home release.

Britain dealt with the same problem institutionally. Ofcom's National Telephone Numbering Plan, inherited from Oftel after the Communications Act 2003, sets aside explicit blocks "for drama use": a thousand numbers behind each of the major city codes — 0113 496 0xxx for Leeds, 020 7946 0xxx for London — the whole of the fictional area code 01632, and 07700 900xxx for mobiles. Tyneside breaks the pattern at 0191 498 rather than 496. Australia's ACMA goes further still and publishes individual numbers rather than ranges, which is why this page's Australian pool is short and finite.

Key properties

• North America reserves exactly one hundred fictional numbers per area code: 555-0100 through 555-0199, withheld by the Industry Numbering Committee and not assignable to subscribers.
• 555-1212 is not a fictional number — it is the traditional directory-assistance code across the North American Numbering Plan, so putting it in a script sends callers to a real service.
• 01632 is not a real UK area code; Ofcom reserves the whole of it for drama, so any 01632 960xxx number is safe by construction.
• Ofcom's geographic drama blocks hold a thousand numbers each, with local numbers ending 0000 to 0999.
• Tyneside's drama block is 0191 498 0000–0999, not 0191 496 — it breaks the pattern the other English city codes follow.
• UK mobile drama numbers come from a single block of a thousand: 07700 900000 to 07700 900999.
• In E.164 form a UK number drops the national trunk prefix 0, so 020 7946 0123 becomes +44 20 7946 0123.
• The ACMA publishes individual reserved numbers rather than blocks, so the Australian pool is finite and short; this page caps output at the size of the list instead of inventing extra numbers.

Where they turn up

• Tommy Tutone's 1982 hit "867-5309/Jenny" is the standing cautionary tale: real holders of that number in many area codes reported years of calls from listeners dialling it.
• Bruce Almighty (2003) displayed 776-2323 without a 555 prefix; after real subscribers were deluged with calls, Universal swapped it for a 555 number in the home-video release.
• British broadcasters draw from Ofcom's drama blocks, which is why numbers beginning 020 7946 recur so often in UK television and film.
• QA fixtures, API documentation and seeded test databases use the 555-01xx block as placeholder data so that automated call and SMS tests cannot reach a real handset — a convention of practice rather than a requirement.
• Australian productions work from the ACMA's published film, television and radio list, of which the mobile number 0491 570 006 is the most-cited entry.