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Comment by ajxs | Hacker News Reader

When I worked for an Australian telco (not Vodafone), some developers on another team had used a very conspicuous mobile phone number in their integration tests, which actually connected to a real SMS service somewhere else in the company. No idea why they would do this. It turned out that this number belonged to a real person, who got absolutely buried in test SMS messages, when the integration tests ran as part of a CI/CD pipeline. The owner raised a complaint to the ombudsman, which led to all kinds of trouble for the developers.

In case anyone else here is curious, the ACMA maintains a list of reserved numbers for use in creative works, which you can use for dummy data: https://www.acma.gov.au/phone-numbers-use-tv-shows-films-and...

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I worked for an Australian insurance company and we physically DDOSed a poor man's real mailbox with printed policy documents as we used their address during e2e testing and we mistakenly didn't put a testing flag somewhere.

Our CTO had to personally apologise to him

I lost a Nationwide Building Society account I've had for forty years last year because the bank bought some extremely poor online-ID-verification system.

The bank forgot it had customers in a Crown Dependency. It forgot those countries issues their own ID, their own passports, their own drivers' licences. It forgot it closed its branches in those countries: it told me I had to go into my branch. My nearest branch is a £200 airfare away. It was not paying, naturally.

The crappy online-verification tool only recognises UK documents. It can't handle Isle of Man ones. They did not think.

This sounds hilarious, how many physical items are we talking? Like his whole front porch full up of contract boxes?

The documents pack is like an A4 folder 1cm thick. He received close to 100 in one day. Enough for his mailbox to get full and for the postie to dump most of it on the lawn

In the 1970s, a German rock group had a one-hit wonder with a protest song against Munich's sex trade licensing (Skandal im Sperrbezirk). In the lyrics, they had a made-up (so they thought) phone number 32-16-8 that fit the meter of their lyrics in German.

Unfortunately, that was a real phone number in many cities, you could dial the short/local number directly without a 0 and the area code back then. Cue prank calls across the country and quite a few scandals since the topic of the song was, after all, the sex trade.

Same thing happened in the USA with 867-5309/Jenny.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/867-5309/Jenny#Popularity_and_...

Online, I believe that one bit of Beverley Hills has the highest number of online users in the USA.

I am one.

I have never visited California or the West Coast of the USA in my life.

But I have used dozens of websites which need a Zip code.

I have never had a Zip code. I have postcodes, like my old one IM2 3EW. That has letters. It won't fit a Zip code field.

So I and millions of others use the only Zip code we know:

Beverley Hills 90210.

I worked at a grocery retailer, and we had the same exact thing. The CI/CD pipeline was firing out order related SMS messages to a contractor's number during test runs for years.

I wonder how common something like this is.

0412 345 678

That was one number we were told to stop using at Internode. I heard similar stories from Optus and Telstra employees.

Someone I know who works at a telco (no idea if Vodafone is a thing in Belgium, but whatever: not Vodafone) was talking about a number someone has: 0411 11 11 11, and they got over a hundred operator messages every day.