Ofcom's Global Titles ban: the last exemptions expire in 16 days

6 October 2026. A deadline most businesses have never heard of lands in 16 days. In April 2025 Ofcom banned the leasing of Global Titles — the special numbers mobile networks use to route calls and texts across global signalling systems. New leases stopped that day; existing ones had to end by 22 April 2026. A narrow exemption for two specific uses was allowed to run until 22 October 2026. After that, third parties can no longer lease UK Global Titles at all.

What Global Titles do — and why leasing them was a loophole

Global Titles are created from ordinary UK phone numbers, but they are not customer-facing lines. They carry the signalling messages that connect calls and texts across networks worldwide — invisible plumbing behind billions of daily communications. That invisibility was the problem. Leased out to third parties, they could fall into the wrong hands: Ofcom found criminals could use them to intercept and divert calls and messages, reach information held by mobile networks — bank security codes sent by SMS, for example — and, in extreme cases, track a phone's physical location anywhere in the world. The National Cyber Security Centre backed the ban, noting the technique was "actively used by unregulated commercial companies"; Ofcom's Natalie Black called leased Global Titles "one of the most significant and persistent sources of malicious signalling".

The timeline that ends on 22 October

The rules landed in stages. Ofcom's statement of 22 April 2025 banned new leasing arrangements immediately, along with any new creation or use of Global Titles from sub-allocated numbers. Existing leases got a year to unwind, with the ban taking full effect on 22 April 2026. Two specific uses — spared because transitioning them is difficult and there was no evidence of misuse — were given until 22 October 2026. Alongside the ban sits guidance for number range holders, in force since day one, making operators responsible for preventing misuse of the titles they control.

Why it matters for business numbers

For most businesses this is background plumbing — but it lands midway through Ofcom's wider clean-up of number misuse, from enforcement investigations into providers whose allocated numbers were used for scams to caller-ID rules aimed at making the number you see a truthful one. A phone number is still the identity a customer trusts, so it pays to hold yours with a provider that keeps it clean and under your control. Porting a geographic, 03 or 0800 number to an independent virtual number provider puts inbound calls on SIP you manage — forwarding, voicemail-to-email and business-hours routing included, on plans from free pay-as-you-go to a £9.97-a-month Pay Monthly plan. Where caller trust is the product, freephone still signals loudest: see DIDcomms's 0800/0808 freephone numbers. We covered the enforcement side in our Vonage/Voxbone investigation post.

Related: Ofcom probes Vonage and Voxbone over number misuse · Ofcom blocks spoofed UK mobile calls