Man pestered by calls from a lawyer's clients uses smart hack to teach him a lesson

Getting spammed by unwanted calls is a drawback of living in a more connected world that most people are aware of. But what does one do when it happens due to a mix up that can be fixed but those who can do so aren't willing to cooperate?

Somsthing like that hapened to a Reddit user u/ethidiumbrimide as he kept getting strange calls in Chinese even at midnight. At first, the man was clueless but even after he figured out the real reason behind those odd calls, a solution remained elusive. The man had the experience in the early 2000s when he had his cell phone number for 4 years.

He wrote, "One night, I got multiple calls from someone who only spoke Chinese. I kept telling them they had a wrong number, which I'm pretty sure they didn't understand." The post further mentioned, "These calls persisted every few weeks at all times of day and night but most frequently between midnight and 3 am. After 6 months, I received a call from a legal assistant to a lawyer named Colin W. She explained to me that there was a typo on his business cards. Instead of a 3 in his phone number, it has a 2, which was my number. She asked if I received calls just to give the person the correct number."

He told the lawyer's assistant to get new business cards with the corrected number. She replied that they had already ordered a lot of the existing cards and didn’t want to get another batch but would make an effort to correct the error. When the calls stopped for a few months, he thought the lawyer had updated his business cards. However, the calls started again soon after, this time with higher frequency.

"So I called Collin W. He apologized and said that he ran a very small immigration law firm and that his legal assistant had quit and it was her that made the phone number correction on the card and he was far too busy to remember to correct every time he handed out his cards," the Reddit post elaborated. "He asked if I could just give the person calling the correct number. I told him that was almost impossible because 99% of his clients didn't speak English, to which he replied 'try your best' and hung up. I tried my best to correct people. But very few understood me and would repeatedly call me after I hung up on them."

After a while, the man visited a mall where a woman at a kiosk asked if he wanted to enter a contest to win a trip to Florida or Mexico. His friend had warned him it was a timeshare scam that used people's numbers to constantly call them, offering free trips and later asking for a fee. This gave the man an idea to give the lawyer a taste of his own medicine. "I entered Colin W. into the contest. There were multiple contests at the mall I entered him into, from trips to free gym memberships to gift cards! I had a lot of downtime at work, so I started to enter him into contests online, usually 5 to 15 a day. After 8 months, I stopped getting calls from Colin W. I looked him up online and he had changed his cellphone number!" the post concluded.

The move to teach the lawyer a lesson found appreciation on Reddit from amused users. u/foxx-hunter joked, "Should have learned Chinese to tell those people this number belongs to a scammer who will run with your money." u/AbruptMango suggested, "Wait a year, then do it to his new number. He did it to your number for a year before you started doing it in return, so you still have a year of doing it before you're even." u/RumBunBun added, "I would have told Collin W. that no, instead of giving callers his phone number, I'd be giving them one of his competitor's phone numbers. That would probably help him remember to correct when handing out cards."