ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 12 -- United States Patent no. 12,250,341, issued on March 11, was assigned to AVOXI INC. (Atlanta).

"Telephone number monitoring" was invented by Randy Layman (Marietta, Ga.), Barbara Dondiego-Stewart (Smyrna, Ga.), Keith Meyers (Senoia, Ga.), Matthew Nichols (Lakewood, Colo.), Robert Rushton (Pelham, Ala.) and Zach Pate (Cumming, Ga.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A system for monitoring phone numbers includes a computing device having at least one processor and memory associated with the processor. A telephone network supports a plurality of telephone numbers. The computing device is configured to obtain data directly from the telephone network. The data indicates ca...