B.C. couple dodging dozens of calls about their missing cat — but their cat isn't missing
CBC
A B.C. couple is begging people to stop calling them.
For over a year, Natasha Lavoie and Jonathan McCurrach have been fielding dozens upon dozens of calls from strangers claiming they've found the couple's cat, Torbo.
But they don't have a cat named Torbo.
And their cat, Mauser, isn't missing.
"Sometimes, like six times a day, I'm getting these really random phone calls and people leaving me voicemails saying that they found my cat and they want money for my cat," Lavoie told CBC's On The Coast host Gloria Macarenko. "I'm like, 'My cat's at home in the air conditioning.'"
After many months of trying to figure out why this was happening, McCurrach asked a caller how they got their number. The caller explained the number was listed on a shirt styled to look like a missing cat poster.
"Why would you use a real number?" McCurrach asked.
CBC News reached out to the company in question — Wisdumb NY — which said the shirt is no longer online. However, on the company's Instagram page, there are photos of missing cat posters with 604 area code numbers attached.
"The use of a real number within the art created was not intentional," a customer service representative said in an email to CBC News.
Some phone numbers have been set aside in North America for fictional use, all starting with the number 555. As Terry O'Reilly explained in a 2021 episode of Under the Influence, the use of 555 started when TV shows and films started using phone numbers more frequently in their plot lines, and attached to those numbers complaints about prank phone calls. Phone companies reserved 555-0100 through to 555-0199 for fictional use.
But, like Wisdumb, not everyone uses those 555 numbers; as reported by The Guardian, Netflix was forced to edit a phone number in the series Squid Game after a South Korean woman was deluged with calls in 2021. In 2009, the same thing happened when rapper Soulja Boy featured a U.K. family's phone number in a song.
Lavoie said she's hesitant to change her number because it's a 604 area code — which was B.C.'s first area code and nowadays, is hard to get. In May, the province got its sixth area code, 257.
"I've had my number for 20 years," she said. "I don't want to change it. I'll just keep not answering."
Some of the calls have been disturbing. In one voicemail they received, a caller claimed they had a snake that "eats free kittens."
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