This one is doing the rounds.
It's not
quite a complete hoax, but
it is a hoax for all practical purposes.
0xxx (just one zero on the front) will NOT get you an international call here. You might get a premium rate number, but it won't be as the note implies (which has been copied from the Snopes write-up straight into the whocallsme database, by the look of it). Ofcom are now much hotter on that numberspace allocation than they used to be, and will disallow misleading numbers, and anyway, you pay for what you dial, NOT where it gets routed to ultimately. There are variations on this for mobiles, but the general principle holds good, except when 'roaming' abroad with a mobile, when all bets are off!
Have a look at
http://countrycode.org/uk. To get an international number from a UK phone used in the UK, you prefix the international dialling code with 00, not a single zero. If you store a full international number in a mobile with "+" at the front, most mobiles will add the 00 automagically (so you don't see it in the phone book). They're not perfect though, and I've had trouble in the USA in the past trying to call back to the UK, when the phone didn't do the international call prefix properly (it's 011 over there). But I digress...
I've just written a rebuttal of this for elderly parents, etc (who get this stuff and worry). The same bit of fiction even turned up in a Surrey C.C. Trading Standards' newsletter last year - try arguing against that!
It beats me why people circulate stuff without doing rudimentary fact checking, especially those who are specifically paid to be exact and to check carefully...
E.
