Weirdest wrong # voicemails... go!

[73349]

What's the strangest wrong number message you've ever gotten?

The ones we got today on our landline had me going 😲 and, I admit, 😆.

It was a guy practically whispering frantically to the effect that his wife had seen stuff on his phone and he was "kind of freaking out" and he had deleted their chats but was afraid she was going to put it all together. The machine hung up on him after a minute and he called back and said more along the same lines. Yikes, dude!

Serves him right, but wow, what a message to leave at somebody's house by mistake.

How about you, ever get a wildly wrong message?

[SKL]

For a long time, some guy was giving out my number as his, presumably by mistake.  People would call me at all hours of the night talking about drug deals and "they got so-and-so."

[Tap]

I used to get ones for someone who gave out my number instead of her own ( not sure if it was an accident or not) . One night I got a call from some guy who was pissed at her for something she did and was yelling at me, wanting to talk to her. I kept insisting she gave the wrong number but he kept calling back using different phones ( I had blocked him) yelling at me to put her on the line. I had teens out with friends, so I had to answer the phone. Ugh that was a longgg night till my teens got home and I could stop answering!! I always wondered what she did to piss him off so bad lol

[Selkie]

This was most likely a scam rather than a wrong number, but Dh got two calls on his phone the other night with a recorded message that said something like, "This call is from an incarcerated inmate at XXX County Jail and may be monitored. Please press 1 to accept this call". 

The county mentioned is not near us, but IS close to the college that two of my kids attend. So just to put my worried mama brain at ease, I had to call my kids and say, "Hey, you're not incarcerated, are you?" They thought I was nuts.😁

 

[mom2scouts]

It's not a wrong number call, but I keep getting a scam call that says I'm eligible to lower my heating costs. It says to "Press 1 to lower your bills or press 2 to continue paying higher bills" and I really want to press 2 to see what happens.

[Tree Frog]

I received a call in the middle of the night about 30 years ago. The caller must've called at just the right time during my sleep cycle because I remember talking to him. I think we talked about 30 minutes until dh rolled over and asked who on earth I was talking to?! The next morning, I remembered the call and what we talked about, but when I was talking to him, it didn't strike me as bizarre that I was talking to some random dude in the middle of the night. 😂

I've received calls from Carol about problems with my student loans. She sounds so legit that if I had student loans, I'd be calling her back in a heartbeat.

[itsheresomewhere]

For over 6 years, this woman was giving out my number instead of hers.  She was switching a digit.  So I got her doctors calls, her attempts to buy a house and her potential employers.  I told one did you really want to hire someone who doesn’t know their phone number.  I told one person from her doctor to take her phone the next time she came in and show her her phone number.  

[Jean in Newcastle]

There is a woman with my exact maiden name- first, middle and last. She keeps getting calls from publishers about her book. I feel quite badly that she is missing these opportunities. 

[fraidycat]

6 minutes ago, itsheresomewhere said:

For over 6 years, this woman was giving out my number instead of hers.  She was switching a digit.  So I got her doctors calls, her attempts to buy a house and her potential employers.  I told one did you really want to hire someone who doesn’t know their phone number.  I told one person from her doctor to take her phone the next time she came in and show her her phone number.  

I get job recruiter, real estate, car and doctor appts., and online purchase receipts to my email address. The real estate and job ones were from actual people so I told them to tell the lady to learn her own email address. I called the car dealership to have them remove my email address from their system. I haven't figured out how to get my email address removed from the Duke Health system yet. 

[Ali in OR]

When I got my first cell phone, I kept getting calls for Imelda. I'm guessing she had the phone number before me. I think she was a house cleaner. I used to think it could be a cool book, picking up the identity of whoever had a phone number before you.

[Junie]

When I was in college, I got a phone call in the middle of the night -- some woman was shrieking at me because my phone number was on her husband's phone.  She accused me of having an affair with him and she was (understandably) really, really angry.  I could hear her husband behind her trying to get her to calm down, telling her that she needed to stop yelling at me.

What I did not realize at that moment, is that my roommate was likely having an affair with this woman's husband. 😞

[klmama]

About 30 years ago I got a call in the middle of the night asking for someone who had previously had my number.  I'd had it for about 5 years at that point, and I'd never gotten a call for that person before.  The caller was the man's uncle trying to contact him to let him know his mother had died, and my number was the last number anyone had for him.  I turned on my light and looked for him in the local phone book, but he wasn't listed.  The uncle sounded so sad....

When dh and I moved to this area, we used to get frequent calls from a cranky woman looking for her adult dd.  She would complain and complain on our answering machine asking why the dd wasn't returning her calls, what was going on, etc., etc.  I called her back once and left a message telling her she was calling our number by mistake, but the calls didn't stop for at least six months.  

For years we also would get calls between 11p.m-2a.m. for an immigrant family whose number was one digit off of ours.  (I finally looked them up in the phone book.)  Someone would call and start chatting away at us in their native language.  When they'd finally slow down for a breath, I'd tell them they had the wrong number, and there would be a huge silence before they'd ask for the people by name in English, and then they'd apologize.  That happened every few weeks for several years; we learned to turn off our phone at night.  

[Loowit]

We used to get phone calls in the middle of the night to our home phone.  Dad's name was similar to another person, but spelled different.  The people calling were usually drunk and mad at the other guy.  We could hear the people yelling but my parents didn't divulge to us kids what exactly they were calling about.  The callers never believed that they had the wrong number.

I get phone calls for a chain pharmacy several times a year.  It is almost the same phone number as mine, but different area code.

[rebcoola]

We used to get wrong number calls all the time because we were only one digit off the local movie theater.  

It got really weird when my oldest sister was manager of said movie theater.  She answered a call one day that was my grandmother who had miss dialed and insited that she stop messing around and hand the phone to my mother. Sister eventually just hung grandma got the number right the next time and spent 20 minutes talking about writing oldest sister out of her will. 

[TechWife]

We used to get calls for my husband from someone wanting to talk to her grandson, who had the same name as my husband. She called every year when the university classes started for four or five years. She would get really mad at me when I would tell her she had the wrong number. The thing is, I wouldn’t know right away because she would ask for him by name, I would tell her that he wasn’t available and ask if I could take a message. She would say “Tell him his grandmother called” and that was the tip off because my dh’s grandparents were deceased, so I knew she had the wrong number. I think the third time was when I started recognizing her voice a bit. 

I have a very common name & have been the subject of many mixups, but none of them were funny that I recall. They are just complicated because it usually means there’s some type of record that needs to be straightened out. 

[mom2scouts]

I kept getting voicemails from what sounded like an older man. He would say how he was doing and I got the impression he was in the hospital or had recently had health issues. I would've called him back and told him he had the wrong number, but he spoke very quietly and mumbled and I could never make out the name or number he gave and I finally blocked him.

[elegantlion]

13 hours ago, Selkie said:

This was most likely a scam rather than a wrong number, but Dh got two calls on his phone the other night with a recorded message that said something like, "This call is from an incarcerated inmate at XXX County Jail and may be monitored. Please press 1 to accept this call". 

The county mentioned is not near us, but IS close to the college that two of my kids attend. So just to put my worried mama brain at ease, I had to call my kids and say, "Hey, you're not incarcerated, are you?" They thought I was nuts.😁

 

I've had a few of those as well. In the past, I had to deal with someone who was incarcerated. When they get access to use the jail phone, they often don't have access to their personal phones, so they're trying to dial numbers from memory. I'm so used to just pressing a number in my contacts, I'm not sure I could easily recall numbers without double checking. 

 

The weirdest wrong number I got was when I was a teenager. Some guy called the house, probably about my age. We sat and talked for 20 minutes about probably random things. My parents were right there. This was pre-Internet and we had an unlisted number, so I wasn't afraid he was stalking or anything. My parents didn't know I was talking to a complete stranger. 

[Tenaj]

The other day I missed a call while keeping stats for a basketball game.  When I checked at halftime the voicemail was a man's voice kind of quiet and mumbling "Are you going to be ok?" Then he hung up.  Weird and sad because I wondered the circumstances but I didn't take the time to try to call him back. 

[Jean in Newcastle]

Dh's number must have been close to an Important National Figure a few years ago.  (Not a president) He was constantly getting calls from news agencies wanting quotes or confirmation on quotes.  Extremely annoying because they kept on calling him despite being told that he was not Important National Figure.  I told him that he should just make up some quotes and see what happens.  😉  (He didn't)