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Sex

This Guy Built An Empire Creating Fake Phone Numbers for Avoiding Creeps

"And please, do your best to forget about the person who gave you this number, because trust us, they have already forgotten about you."

Photo by Raf Katigbak

If you've ever been asked for your number by an aggressive creep, chances are you've either thrown a drink in someone's face or given out a random fake number in a last-ditch attempt to escape being stealth-grinded at the club. In the early 2000s, I was introduced to what became my favourite decoy for dodging clueless fuckboys who couldn't take obvious social cues: the Rejection Hotline, composed of an array of numbers with different area codes you could give out that would emit a prerecorded rejection in the ear of said creeps when they dialed:

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Hello, this is in not the person you were trying to call. You have reached the Rejection Hotline! Unfortunately, the person who gave you this number did not want you to have their real number. We know this sucks, but don't be too devastated. So, why were you given a Rejection Hotline number? Maybe you're just not this person's type. Note: This could mean boring, dumb, annoying, arrogant or just a general weirdo. Maybe you suffer from bad breath, body odor, or a nasty combination of the two. Maybe you just give off that creepy overbearing, psycho-stalker vibe and the idea of going out with you just seems as appealing as playing leapfrog with unicorns. Regardless of the reason, please take the hint. Accept the fact that you were rejected, and then get over it. And please, do your best to forget about the person who gave you this number, because trust us, they have already forgotten about you.

The cruel-but-hilarious message was a godsend for myself and others who often found themselves in uncomfortable situations of attempted conquest. My friends and I spent much of our middle school years (and admittedly part of high school) abusing the Rejection Hotline, often passing the numbers around within our cliques during lunch period or after school, dialing in at sleepovers on our flip phones, or tricking complete strangers we met online in chatrooms into calling it.

The creator of the hotline, Jeff Goldblatt, who was 23 when he launched the hotline in 2001, now works out of Atlanta Tech Village in Georgia mentoring new entrepreneurs and working on several of his own projects. Despite spending no money on advertising, Goldblatt's hotline went viral to the point of garnering millions of calls and thousands of dollars in phone bills every month. The other day I called him up to figure out how exactly how his legendary hotline came to be and to hear the voice of the guy who rejected millions in a single pre-recorded message.

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VICE: How did you come up with the idea to troll creeps with the Rejection Hotline?
Jeff Goldblatt: Basically, I was just being a wise ass trying to make my friends laugh. We were out at a bar one night having some drinks and people watching, and we saw this scene develop where we felt bad for a girl who was being hit on by this guy that she clearly wanted nothing to do with. Then we felt bad for him when she had enough and stood up and started screaming at him, embarrassing him in front of the whole bar. The next day I put up this voicemail message and told my friends, "This is what that girl should have given to that guy." My friends thought it was funny, and their friends thought it was, and next thing we knew, we were getting thousands and thousands of phone calls every day.

Then we were doing a million calls a month, and it just kept growing. I dubbed myself America's worst entrepreneur for the first two years because we were getting millions and millions of phone calls, and I was not yet making any money with it. [My company, RH Brands,] had about 300 varieties of Humor Hotlines, including the It Could Always Suck More and the Automated Sobriety Test lines, and probably 10–20 percent of them went viral and got millions of calls.

Wait, so it was a personal voice mailbox you set it up on?
The first business I had started was for web consulting. All my clients had my personal number, so I had this business voice inbox that was just sitting there getting no calls, and I was paying $15 a month for it. I put the first recording up on that. Pretty soon we had crashed that whole system because it just wasn't designed to handle tons and tons of calls or a lot of simultaneous calls. We crashed a lot of voicemail systems back in the early days before we figured out the telecom side of things—then we were able to handle thousands of concurrent calls because when the stuff went viral, we would literally get thousands of calls at the exact same time.

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What would happen if you would call and there were too many people trying to phone in at the same time? Would you get a busy signal?
Busy signals I wasn't too concerned about because I felt like, regardless of whether people knew they were calling for a joke or not, a good percentage of them would call back. But it would actually crash systems. There were times when I was setting up a line, I would ask, "Are you sure it can handle unlimited calls?" because I always knew there was a chance my stuff was going to go viral and get thousands of calls. People would always say that it could, and one by one, we crashed lots of telecom companies' systems. After those first few years of learning, we had turned into a real company. We were paying thousands and thousands of dollars a month in telecom system bills. We had dedicated servers.

The first recording of the Rejection Hotline, did it stay exactly the same throughout the entire run?
I made a few small changes several years ago. I did that after some people had pointed out that it could be used in a mean way. I wanted nothing to do with anything that could be used to bully people. I changed it from "short, fat, and ugly" to "boring, dumb, and annoying." It might not sound like that big of a difference, but short, fat, and ugly are things you can't necessarily control about yourself, whereas boring, dumb, and annoying are things that you could work on. I always encouraged people to use it as a last resort. I would say that 99 percent of people who called it probably were calling it because their friend said, "Hey, this is funny," not because they were getting rejected.

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The Rejection Hotline itself, at our peak in 2010, we were averaging about 10 million phone calls a month.

Oh wow, yeah, I used it around 2005. I heard that before you started the hotline, you studied journalism. Did you ever work in that field, or did you always focus on the hotlines?
I kind of went all in on this whole Humor Hotline thing long before it was making money. I knew I had something; I saw how well people responded.

In college, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I did a triple concentration in journalism, marketing, and philosophy. I wanted to keep my options open. I'm self-diagnosed ADD—it took me a long time to find something that could really keep my attention and motivate me. The writing background has helped me tremendously. I teach classes on viral marketing… what makes things go viral is the little details, the writing, the word choice, the length of writing.

Did you do all the writing for the hotlines?
I did for about 80 percent of them. I tried at times to work with various comedy writers, and it never really worked out as well. I didn't want the company to be dependent on me writing all the scripts, and I was getting kind of burned out with it because we were cranking out three new hotlines a month. Writing for the phone was kind of this unique animal. I worked with some guys who were super-funny, creative comedy writers for TV (like some from Family Guy) or on the web, and writing for the phone was just different.

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What became of the Rejection Hotline and your other lines?
In 2007, I brought in a business partner, and we had five years of really strong growth on the revenue side. In 2012, Verizon and AT&T changed some regulations regarding the mobile content industry. It put a lot of our advertisers out of business. As soon as that change happened, we knew that we weren't going to be able to stay in the business. We had to start laying off employees, which was horrible.

In 2013, we sold off all of the phone numbers—we had thousands of individual ones. Rejection was the one we had the most numbers for because that was the only one people needed to be able to pass on as their own number with their local area code. There were just under half a billion phone calls in all—the Rejection Hotline was 20–25 percent of that.

We didn't sell content, audio files, scripts… Everything I did with the content to make it go viral on the phone I'm basically undoing now and trying to make it make sense on the web.

How the fuck did you make money off of the hotlines anyway?
Well, you're in good company because my parents didn't understand it, my friends didn't. My business partner came in from the advertising industry—he saw that we had this audience that was actively engaging with the phone at their ear. The revenue model became we would serve an audio ad at the end of all the calls, just like people would pay for an ad on the radio. That worked well for us until Verizon and AT&T changed those rules. Most of our best money came from mobile content stuff like ringtones, mobile games, sweepstakes. That was back before your phone did literally everything.

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We had four years in a row of low seven-figure revenue, and I owned 40 percent of the company. When I first started it, I didn't really have any money, so I took a live-in position as a house director at a fraternity house so I didn't have to worry about paying rent, utilities, or supporting myself. It certainly put a damper on my social life because it's not the coolest thing in the world to tell a girl you've been out of college for a few years but you still live in a fraternity house. It was really the only way I could keep going with the business as long as I did without making any money at first.

What did you do with the money you made?
I bought a monkey and a tiger… nah, just kidding. I haven't really settled down, still single and looking. A lot of the money I was able to save, which is what I'm using now to reinvest. I do once a year take a work retreat cruise. Randomly, I came up with some of my better Humor Hotline ideas while on vacation in a tropical environment, so I justified it.

What are you up to these days now that your hotline biz has shut down?
I had so many ideas back then that I wanted to do, but because we were doing really well with the Humor Hotline business, I had to put all those aside. What I've been doing over the last year is pulling all those ideas back out of hibernation. I'm basically going to be launching over the course of the next year 100 different ideas in some form or another. I've got CheapFunStuff.com: we've got the One-Night Stand Kit/One-Night Shack Pack, the Bad Breath Bag… mostly gag gifts.

Has anyone ever told you their personal stories about using the Rejection Hotline?
I've met several people who've been on the receiving end of a Rejection Hotline number, but even those people are able to tell me how funny they thought it was. I've never encountered anyone who was legitimately angry. If you're going to get a fake phone number, you might as well get the Rejection Hotline rather than some random number that wakes up a little old lady.

Have you ever given anyone a Rejection Hotline number?
I have not. If I was to give it out I'm pretty sure the person could track me down easily through the website—the fact that it's actually my voice on the recording. The question I get asked more often is if I have ever received one of my numbers, which I almost wish that I had, but I'd like to think that before I ask a girl for her number that I've been talking to her long enough to know if there's any interest.

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter.