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What’s worse than spam calls to your personal cell number? One T-Mobile customer recently found out the hard way.
A user over on Reddit recently had a bizarre situation where their father-in-law suddenly began receiving a deluge of phone calls to their cell phone. Ignoring the calls as random spam at first, eventually they answered to discover the person on the other end thought they were calling T-Mobile support.
This story is crazy but it’s 100% true… Yesterday, my father in-law, who is a T-mobile customer, starts getting phone calls non-stop… He ignores them because he doesn’t recognize any of the numbers but finally decides to answer a call because they just keep coming.
u/burkarm on Reddit
The person calling him thinks they are calling T-mobile support.
Confused, they posted on the family group chat asking what to do. Reddit user u/burkarm did some digging, and realized that with the right search term, Google was sharing their father-in-law’s personal number as a legitimate T-Mobile support number. But how?
He’s asking how they got his number and people are telling him they Googled T-mobile support and that’s what popped up.
u/burkarm on Reddit
Well, it turns out, the user’s mother-in-law had recently created an account on the official T-Mobile discussion forums to share an experience they had at a local store. Unfortunately, they somehow used the father-in-law’s phone number as their username. Oops.
So it turns out my mother-in’law wrote that post and for whatever reason used my father in law’s number as the account name.
u/burkarm on Reddit
That was bad enough already, but how did it end up being shown on Google? A classic case of indexing gone wrong.
Google crawls the web constantly, and occasionally will find information that it deems worthy to share widely when people search for specific info. In this case, Google’s mysterious algorithms decided that the phone number that was set as the username was actually a T-Mobile support number.
The result? Occasionally, when searching for the T-Mobile support phone number on Google, it served up a call button to directly call that number. Yikes.
Hopefully, the issue didn’t last too long, and the user’s father-in-law is no longer receiving calls from customers trying to reach T-Mobile support. It’s a good lesson to always be careful where you type your personal information, and a lesson on how automated parts of the internet can be. At least it wasn’t a fake threatening letter sent in the mail!
