Last Call Return

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"Star 69" redirects here. For other uses, see Star 69 (disambiguation).

Last Call Return (in North America) or Call Return (in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada) is a telephone feature code offered by telephone service providers to give a called party the time and telephone number of the last received call, and may also offer the facility to place a call back to the calling party. The same feature on a PBX is known as camping or camp-on.

The access number for this facility varies per country and provider:

Canada and US: star code *69 (*66 in some markets); 1169 (1166 in some markets) on rotary phone/pulse dial telephones.
UK: 1471 (also used in Gibraltar and Ireland)
Australia: *10# (*69 on Optus HFC Telephony)
France: 3131

In the UK, after dialing "1471", the caller can press "3" to automatically return the call. Until August 2004, this service was free; after that date, as of 10 January 2007 a per call fee of 7.5 pence is charged.

The service provider may also offer a facility through which the calling party can prevent their number being revealed to the called party, either permanently or on a per-call basis. This is achieved by prefixing the dialed number with:

UK: 141
US: *67
Australia: 1831

Conversely, to send the caller number on a line where the number is normally withheld, the following prefixes can be dialled:

UK: 1470 (also used in Gibraltar)
Ireland: 142
US: *82

In Ireland and Gibraltar, ex-directory or unlisted numbers are withheld by default.

Many companies withhold their direct-line numbers when calling out, or mask them with a generic switchboard number, and in many government agencies it is a disciplinary offense to make a direct-line number available in this way.

In some markets, early on, the command simply connected the person employing it directly to the party, without any interceding information.

In many telephone companies there are two ways of having it: whether have it included in the package or as a pay per use feature.

In Canada, the feature is commonly marketed by telephone companies as a combination of two features:

Call Again, a form of automatic ring back, allows a caller, on reaching a busy signal, to hang up, dial a special code, and be called back automatically when the called number is no longer busy, usually with a limit of 30 minutes.
Call Return allows a customer to dial a code that identifies the last incoming call. On some types of central office equipment, it announces the number and offers the call-back option; on others, it simply attempts a connection without an announcement.

[edit] Trivia

In 1994, the band R.E.M. titled a song "Star 69" on their album Monster.
Artist Fatboy Slim also has a song called "Star 69".
Melodic hardcore band Lifetime has a song called "Starsixtynine".
In the 1999 motion picture "Fight Club" (directed by David Fincher), the Narrator (Edward Norton) tries to call Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) from a public pay phone. The call doesn't go through. Seconds later, the pay phone rings and, in the ensuing exchange, Tyler says to the Narrator that he never picks up his phone, explaining "I star sixty-nined you".
The lyrics to Hilary Duff's song The Math on her 2003 album Metamorphosis include the line "I am calling you back, this is star sixty nine".