I was getting fraud alerts via SMS for somebody elses bank account for quite awhile. I always replied "NO" - I did not make the charge in question, which is true. Eventually I guess they got tired of getting their card locked or realized the contact info was wrong.

I ordered pizza to another guy that shares almost the exact same phone number as me, but the kicker is that we've both managed to choose the same PIN-number to log in. I noticed after placing the order that the delivery address was half way across the country.

Called the pizza place and it took them quite some time to understand what could have gone wrong. I had, after all, logged in, and was still logged in. We had a good laugh when we figured it out. Sales rep called the guy up, but I don't think he cancelled the pizza. So free pizza, I guess.

OK, we are wondering way off topic here, by my pizza & phone number story....

Back in the days of pheasant-under-glass mainframes, I had a part time student job as an operator in the computation center. We had a phone at the operator console, and 90% of the legitimate calls came from the operator console at the computation center at the other state university on the other side of the state. Our phone number happenned to be the same, but for the middle two digits reversed, of the most popular pizza place in a college town. The vast majority of the calls were to place a pizza order, not someone looking for the on-duty mainframe operator.

Our standard practice was to answer the phone “wrong number” — because it usually was. Anyone with a legit reason to call us knew the drill. Pizza orderers, especially the half-drunk ones, were our amusment on an lonely night shift of hanging tapes.

Would you mind adding context here, what's a PIN number in the context of pizza delivery?

1234

Uh oh, i guess i need to change the combination for the lock on my luggage! :-)

Whew! I dodged a bullet there. My luggage combination is 1111!

And you'd better do it with ludicrous speed. ;)

No, no, they've gone to plaid! :-)

Outrageous! I only order pizza from places that requires a minimum of 16 chars passwords and 2FA.

The password for your account on the pizza place's website. (The user name being the phone number, apparently.)

That seems appalling, why wouldn't it just have a normal email/password combination?

> think

what do you mean by "think" ? I understand that mishaps can happen when numbers are canceled and moved to another person, but the old number is still registered in certain places, but why would someone want someone's else number ?

I am not suggesting it is voluntary but no, it is not a matter of an old number. I had this number for over 13 years and the problem only started to occur 2-3 years ago.

Is this person from the same country as you? If not, may be the problem is morons who clip phone numbers to 32 bit integers.

It looks like it is (he opened a UK bank account with my number).

A friend went through this type of situation. What happened in her case is that somebody with a bad credit history used to use her cellphone number years ago.

When my friend linked her CVS account to her mobile phone, CVS sells each interaction to various parties. There's a whole business where certain debt collectors will buy almost aged out debt for $0.01 on the dollar, "make contact with the debtor" and once that happens, they can resell the debt for $0.05 on the dollar.

All of the sudden she started getting messages that she won cars, etc. All attempting to establish contact.

Because companies buy and mix data from different sources, it's easy for companies to inject bad data, as they assume that certain types of data are highly reliable.

Welcome to my world!

My real name is extremely common, and each time I've been assigned a new phone number, I get calls for months (sometimes years) from private investigators, collection agencies, etc., looking for someone else who shares my name.