alt.hn

3/5/2026 at 4:37:43 AM

You Just Reveived

 https://dylan.gr/1772520728

by djnaraps

3/5/2026 at 7:42:41 AM

As someone working for a telco, not Vodafone, this would be my assumptions: A developer mistakenly grabbed a real MSISDN, instead of a QA one, while testing a promo still in development.

I only say this because there's no identifier to differenciate a real phone number from a test one. Subscribers often called to report those gibberish text messages they received. It's always a dev entering an incorrect number while testing.

by firefoxd

3/5/2026 at 8:11:46 AM

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...

by ajxs

3/5/2026 at 10:13:43 AM

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

by id00

3/5/2026 at 12:31:33 PM

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

by aetherspawn

3/5/2026 at 1:24:32 PM

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

by id00

3/5/2026 at 8:26:02 AM

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.

by runfrook

3/5/2026 at 2:55:31 PM

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.

by red_admiral

3/5/2026 at 9:45:04 AM

0412 345 678

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

by nandomrumber

3/5/2026 at 11:46:48 AM

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.

by tmtvl

3/5/2026 at 8:15:48 AM

I was slightly more inclined to think it might be some bored employee somewhere acting in a sort of Robin Hood capacity just because it's unusually accurate and thorough for a test message. I'd expect more like TEST TEST test DFOIUHDFUOHDFOIUHDFROIHDSFOIHDSF LOREM IPSUM 999999.

Sometimes enthusiastic or particularly bored developers do put in the effort to write things out like a real message though.

by Nition

3/5/2026 at 3:47:03 PM

I have a phone number that is +1(gapless non-decreasing sequence). I’m entertained every week by developers testing.

(Also, people using it as a fake number for some appointment/reservation - which I sometimes update to change their name or add a special request :))

by JakaJancar

3/5/2026 at 10:03:43 AM

Testing vs prod bugs are always FUN.

In my first job we had warehouse management system, and for testing new versions we allowed users to log-in to test environment.

Some employees didn't knew they were supposed to only log in to prod and happily worked in their warehouse accepting deliveries, stocktaking, moving stuff in real world using test db instead of the prod one. We only realized when they moved so much stuff that the inconsistencies db vs reality triggered alarms.

by ajuc

3/5/2026 at 6:00:31 AM

The "unlimited data" is an interesting contrast and always makes me wonder "at how much speed?"

I am more surprised that mobile plans are still charging by the minute. A "toll quality" 64kbps audio stream is 480KB per minute. More advanced codecs use a fraction of that.

by userbinator

3/5/2026 at 7:14:13 AM

Where I live, all five providers I’ve examined advertise their home broadband plans as unlimited, but four have a limit (mostly called a “fair use policy”) between 3.3 and 3.5 TB, after which they’ll be shaped to 1 Mbps. Suspiciously colludy. (The fifth: “These are unlimited plans for home use only. You can consume unlimited data at high speed. However, [we] may discontinue the data services in case of misuse, fraudulent, unauthorised or commercial use.”)

At 50 Mbps, you can theoretically exhaust this in just over six days. At 1 Gbps, it takes less than eight hours.

Once shaped—a month of 1 Mbps is less than 335 GB.

So in practice all these unlimiteds boil down to less than 4TB/month.

by chrismorgan

3/5/2026 at 7:29:47 AM

Wish the FCC had listened to us when Comcast first introduced their first very high bandwidth cap in their first market. (Must’ve been more than a decade ago, maybe and a half.) We knew how bad it was in Canada.

by Barbing

3/5/2026 at 8:10:55 AM

From the screenshot it looks like he actually received "only" around 2TB of free mobile data.

by Nition

3/5/2026 at 10:16:49 AM

It's 64 kbps (hopefully) with quality of service, and very often still with per-minute billing paid to the receiving carrier, whether it runs over actual circuit-switched hardware or not.

by lxgr

3/5/2026 at 10:23:58 AM

> Did I actually receive 999999 minutes? Yes, indeed I did. But unfortunately, I was only given 7200 minutes to spend my 999999 minutes and I could only spend them 1 minute at a time.

Well, not with that attitude! Initiate a 139-party conference call from your phone and you'll just about make it.

by lxgr

3/5/2026 at 5:57:08 AM

It said "for five days". So I'd assume those minutes/data will only last for that period of time. So I'd imagine this is like when I go to Amazon every X+n months and it tries to reel me back in with a free month of prime. They're giving you freebies to use, to establish habits which they can then profit from later down the line.

by Quarrelsome

3/5/2026 at 6:52:51 AM

The article was pretty clear about this:

> Before I continue, I will answer the obvious question: Did I actually receive 999999 minutes? Yes, indeed I did. But unfortunately, I was only given 7200 minutes to spend my 999999 minutes and I could only spend them 1 minute at a time.

by saghm

3/5/2026 at 9:12:02 AM

I would’ve enjoyed starting a conference call and adding multiple people in, breaking away from the 1 minute at a time limit.

by mortar

3/5/2026 at 7:09:47 AM

And no explanation what happens after that with the minutes they had before.

by econ

3/5/2026 at 7:28:01 AM

& the closer:

>For five days I had a million minutes and I was possibly the first and only Vodafone minute millionaire

by Barbing

3/5/2026 at 7:18:59 AM

I rely on those free months of prime. I don't order from Amazon often but when I do next day shipping is great. Just gotta set a reminder to cancel.

by ThrowawayTestr

3/5/2026 at 7:43:23 AM

Cancel right away? Or are Amazon subs different?

by magackame

3/5/2026 at 7:41:54 AM

You can cancel immediately after subscribing. You will keep access until the end of the trial period and will not be billed.

by ThePowerOfFuet

3/5/2026 at 6:38:56 AM

For more than six months now, s.o. is (perhaps accidentally) paying my mobile bill. I have two sim cards, one is data, almost unused. Called the operator twice, concerned that a granny is messing the user ID, or that s.o. is trying to impersonate me by paying the bills and then claiming ownership. Two times reps. assure me that they have no clue who does the payment as it arrives from a partner network taking cash payments only, and that it is impossible for anyone person to claim ownership of the SIM.

And while the amount is not a large one, it is still very suspicious this keeps going on, even after two very long calls with the support. I'm going to soon speak to the partner network, but it is appalling how much these people are not interested in who actually gives their enterprise money. They're only there to take it.

by larodi

3/5/2026 at 6:54:53 AM

What does SO stand for here? I assumed Significant Other but that doesn’t square with the story as surely you’d just ask

by dkdbejwi383

3/5/2026 at 12:51:01 PM

s.o. = someone

I have lived for at least a long while with the impression it is common abbreviation :D

by larodi

3/5/2026 at 1:53:59 PM

It's a common abbreviation for significant other, i.e. one's husband/wife or partner, but never seen it abbreviate "someone" before.

by lewispollard

3/5/2026 at 6:56:53 AM

"someone?"

by fwipsy

3/5/2026 at 7:11:39 AM

this makes the most sense but i have never in my life seen someone abbreviate someone as SO, haha.

by Sebguer

3/5/2026 at 12:18:25 PM

They're probably French, the French are always writing qqn and qqch for "quelqu'un" and "quelque chose".

A couple other small tells, although very fluent... "enterprise" instead of "business", etc.

by titanomachy

3/5/2026 at 10:56:20 AM

Not exactly the same, but "sb." and "sth." are common abbreviations in dictionaries, e.g. "to meet sb." or "to pick sth. up". To those familiar with this convention, "s.o." can generally be inferred from context.

by majewsky

3/5/2026 at 7:29:09 AM

xkcd 10000 :)

by luz666

3/5/2026 at 10:50:50 AM

> it is appalling how much these people are not interested in who actually gives their enterprise money

Why should they be?

In more than a few jurisdictions you can pay utilities or property taxes via an online portal without logging in. You just pull up a property, click "make a payment", and enter an amount along with a payment method into the portal. If you were to use a gift card for a utility payment I believe all they'd have is a browser fingerprint and an IP address. But why should that be an issue?

by fc417fc802

3/5/2026 at 12:53:08 PM

well... imagine this - you are a concert agency, then some promoter comes, and hires you to do this hall and this artist. you do, it sells out, the room is near empty.

should you be concerned where did the money come and go?

by larodi

3/5/2026 at 7:36:55 PM

That's entirely different because the agency is an intermediary. How can you abuse a utility service to launder money?

Even then unless legally obligated I don't see why you should care. Just report the highly suspicious activity and let law enforcement handle it. Not your problem.

by fc417fc802

3/5/2026 at 9:25:18 PM

the utility service gets in trouble because not doing due diligence or even is assumed helping facilitate the scheme.

by larodi

3/5/2026 at 9:53:29 PM

They don't get in trouble because you can't abuse a utility to launder money. The onus is on you to provide an example here.

You only need to look into your customers to the extent required by law; beyond that it's not your problem. In your example with an intermediary a failure to report suspicious activity could potentially result in you being viewed as an accomplice.

by fc417fc802

3/5/2026 at 12:25:27 PM

> it is appalling how much these people are not interested in who actually gives their enterprise money

After we bought our house, the property tax was still billed to the previous owner for some time. We called our local city hall, and their answer was basically "just talk to the previous owner and pay the tax for them, we don't care where the money comes from".

Pecunia non olet.

by lqet

3/5/2026 at 6:49:52 AM

any chance someone who knows you is simply paying your bill out of kindness?

by luxuryballs

3/5/2026 at 6:03:24 AM

I'm even more intrigued by the whole family sharing two phones and switching sim cards. What's the reason behind it? How does it work?

by jaksa

3/5/2026 at 12:00:19 PM

Dylan is the sort of computer person who was like "fuck this crap" and went into farming. I'm surprised they still update their blog.

by blueflow

3/5/2026 at 6:21:24 AM

Probably practicing minimalism

by internetter

3/5/2026 at 6:31:04 AM

Frankly - how many phone calls do you really make and take these days?

It's vanishingly rare for me. I got a call from a friend today - but I think I otherwise only make or receive a legit phone call every few days. We use social media mostly. Work "calls" are on apps.

A family could probably get away with 2 phones easily, as long as they have home internet.

Now... When I was young and internet was over dial-up, having a single phone line for our whole family caused quite a lot of spats.

by RajT88

3/5/2026 at 6:23:27 AM

My guess is personal and business number on different sims. Then just swap the devices that’s in. They don’t like being connected all the time.

by joecool1029

3/5/2026 at 11:20:17 AM

Back in 2017-8 I've got a four consequent top ups of an equivalent of $50 each (so a total of $200) from an unknown source. After that I've got a call from a resident cell number saying I've got a $200 fine for watching porn that I laughed off and hung up. I thought it was a scam to make me pay the "fine" with the money I've just got and then call the operator, tell them they "mistakenly" paid for the wrong number (four times for $50, lol) and get the money back. So I sat there and waited for the money to be recalled... but it never happened.

My theory is that it was exactly then I was changing operators while keeping my number, so the scammers tried complaining to the wrong one and failed. Not that I had any objections for the 2 years of free calls and data this got me but this still is a bit of mystery to me.

by jllyhill