WTBuy: Others - Other why do sellers post their numbers with words? i.e: 1234 five s

[arivere]

Advertisement Category: Want To Buy (WTB)

Equipment Type: Others
Equipment Brand: Other
Equipment Model: why do sellers post their numbers with words? i.e: 1234 five six seven eight nine
Budget (S$): 0
Description:
why do sellers post their numbers with words? i.e: 1234 five six seven eight nine

recently I was scouting for some photography equipment and chance upon some odd sellers listing their numbers in alpha numeric manners.
it was rather inconvenient for me to contact the sellers:

1. I couldn't cut & paste the number to my whatapps, phone dailer nor contact phone book.

2. It's inconvenient to close the page, convert the alphabet to numbers and reopen the page again.

I was wondering why would any seller make e process inconvenient for his customer?
Perhaps, s/he assume that Clubsnap prevents users from displaying their phone numbers, if that is his/her case, the seller seems to be a person who is dishonest by breaking policy, would he sell me something durable, would he cheat me? 😦😰



Real Name: alpha numeric numbers
Warranty Status: not applicable

 

[kandinsky]

It's a variant of a simple method used by people to obfuscate their contact details, to avoid having it easily picked up by spambots trawling the net. It's quite commonly used for emails. E.g. myname [at] gmail [dot] com. I'm not sure about the effectiveness, but as far as I know, there's no policy against it here, nor on any other forums I've been on. It seems to be a widely accepted practice, as everyone understands the pervasiveness of spam.

Address munging is the practice of disguising an e-mail address to prevent it from being automatically collected by unsolicited bulk e-mail providers. Address munging is intended to disguise an e-mail address in a way that prevents computer software from seeing the real address, or even any address at all, but still allows a human reader to reconstruct the original and contact the author: an email address such as, "no-one@example.com", becomes "no-one at example dot com", for instance.

Any e-mail address posted in public is likely to be automatically collected by computer software used by bulk emailers (a process known as e-mail address harvesting). Addresses posted on webpages, Usenet or chat rooms are particularly vulnerable to this.[1] Private e-mail sent between individuals is highly unlikely to be collected, but e-mail sent to a mailing list that is archived and made available via the web or passed onto a Usenet news server and made public, may eventually be scanned and collected.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_munging

I assume you're referring to the Personal Classifieds section? As that section is for personal items only, it's unlikely that sellers who post there think of other users as 'customers', they probably see themselves as individuals selling off personal items, and simply want to try to avoid getting spam, while providing their contact details. In fact, in the Personal Classifieds Input Form filled out by users, the contact number and email address fields are optional.

 

[huatman]

Before that "do not call" law, once u list ur nos in detail online, high chance u will start to received even more calls/sms on ad for various products and services. Even now sometime still received calls from overseas (mostly) or SMS on loan which is illegal as understand even if it legal company, they not allow to advertise.

Same for email, once u list it online. Be prepare to receives many spam mails.

That why people start to state all those words, sign in between which I do same too.

 

[arivere]

Hey All,

I'm glad to receive all of your inputs, you learn something new everyday, now im enlightened!

 

[edutilos-]

It is also at times used to hide the forum nickname being linked to the number. So for example, if you kena low ball by 91234567, and you want to search for who he is, it's harder to think of what to find when it's listed as 9onetwothree4567, for example.

 

[daredevil123]

The funny thing is, nowadays google is smart enough to read the words too..

 

[arivere]

how does google do that? do u type in e cell # and do a search?

 

[SilentSeth]

Yeah.. Google use powerful algorithms to process the search keywords. It will translate number to words, space to dash etc while trying to find the most relevant search result for you.